Workshops and Symposia
Convened by our core project team, Desert Disorders workshops and symposia brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and institutions to interrogate narratives about ‘desert’ spaces along our core themes: mobilities, ecologies, and borderlands.
Workshops
Our first workshop and webinar, held 28-29 November 2023, brought together Ariell Ahearn, Joanna Allen, Jutta Bakonyi, Saud Baloch, Katherine Baxter, Madeline Clements, Farhana Ibrahim, Sina Maghami Nick, Troy Sternberg, and Sharon Wilson to discuss mobilities in desert and arid regions. Work in progress was pre-circulated for discussion. This work explored women herders’ changing roles in Gobi pastoralism; nomadic pastoralism in the Zagros mountains of Iran; politics, visual and literary arts in Balochistan; and animal mobilities and bordering practices in the British Somaliland Protectorate.
Our second workshop focused on ‘Ecologies’ and was held in conjunction with the School of Liberal Arts (SoLA) at the Institute of Indian Technology in Jodhpur on April 26 2024. The workshop explored the epistemological, literary and sovereign orders of desert ecologies. The workshop was facilitated by Deborah Sutton, and featured presentations of work-in-progress by Aiden Tynan and Tanuja Kothiyal, followed by an open discussion. Aiden’s work considered the limits of ecological thought in how deserts are conceptualized, while Tanuja’s reflected on the themes of migration and mobility in the Thar desert.
Our third workshop focused on Borders and was held in collaboration with the Centre for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan. The workshop explored borders and bordering practices in arid and semi-arid regions. Facilitated by Farhana Ibrahim, this closed workshop included presentations of work in progress from Eman Alasah, Sahana Ghosh, Radhika Gupta and Mansour Nasasra. Eman and Mansour focused on Palestinian contexts, while Sahana and Radhika discussed borders and bordering practices in South Asia.
Our first Desert Disorders Symposium took place 10-11 December, 2024 at the India International Centre, New Delhi. The symposium brought together scholars from Canada, Germany, India, Somaliland and the UK to discuss human-animal interactions, environmental extractivism, agriculture, water management and social politics in arid and semi-arid regions. In between panels for paper presentations we ran open discussions and workshop activities that opened up our thinking about deserts, arid and semi-arid regions including issues of temporality, the value and limit points of comparative desert studies and, importantly, the question of language and discourse.
Our second Desert Disorders Symposium took place 12-13 April, 2024 at the Hargeysa Cultural Centre, Hargeysa. At this symposium researchers, activists and policy makers from Denmark, Ethiopia, France, India, Kenya, Somaliland and the UK to share research on pastoralism and food security in the both the Thar and Somaliland. The symposium was formally opened by Sharmaake Abdi Musse, Deputy Minister of Fishery and Marine Resources.