30 January - 3 February 2025 | Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur
Pardis Mahdavi is currently Dean of Social Sciences and Director of the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Before coming to Arizona, Dr. Mahdavi was Acting Dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver after spending 11 years at Pomona College from 2006-2017, where she most recently served as professor and chair of anthropology and director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College as well as Dean of Women. Her research interests include gendered labour, human trafficking, migration, sexuality, human rights, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. She has published four single authored books and one edited volume in addition to numerous journal and news articles. She has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 2018, she was appointed by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and re-appointed by Governor Jared Polis to serve on the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.
Academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani’s recent book, Neither Settler nor Native, is a genealogy of political modernity based on the idea of the colonial state and nation state being a bi-product of each other. Steeped in research and case studies the book unravels the need to reimagine political communities beyond the concept of majorities and minorities. In conversation with Pardis Mahdavi, Mamdani explores the origins and development of the nation state and the path to a reimagined and decolonised future.