NZIRI Symposium 2027
Call for Papers for NZIRI's upcoming symposium in February 2027.
Unsettling environments: People, land, water and air in India
A symposium convened by Te Pūtahi Rangahau o Inia ki Aotearoa | New Zealand India Research Institute.
Symposium dates: 17-18 February.
Venue: Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington.
This symposium invites scholars working on India, from any disciplinary background in the humanities and social sciences, to think rigorously and concretely about land, water, and air, not as abstract environmental categories but as the ground of human life, shared, contested, managed, imagined, and fought over. We are interested in how people in India relate to these elemental resources across a range of registers: as commons held and governed collectively, as sites of enclosure and dispossession, as sources of livelihood and aspiration, and as grounds of exclusion where access is denied by caste, class, gender, or policy. The symposium takes seriously both the material stakes of resource governance and the ways in which communities understand, narrate, and contest their relationship to land, water, and air.
Papers should be grounded in specific places, communities, or practices. We are especially interested in work that brings environmental and ecological questions into conversation with questions of equity, rights, and aspiration, and that resists treating “India” as a single undifferentiated unit. Possible regional foci include, but are not limited to Uttarakhand and the Western Ghats, river basin communities across peninsular India, and urban air and water governance in cities such as Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata.
Who should submit:
We invite submissions from scholars based in Aotearoa New Zealand, including postgraduate researchers. We particularly encourage PhD candidates and recent doctoral graduates to submit. We also welcome papers from overseas scholars but will not be able to provide any funding for their travel to Wellington. We may, however, offer modest accommodation to a limited number of overseas participants. However, as funding is limited, there will be a selection process.
Key dates:
Abstracts due: 14 September 2026.
Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2026.
Symposium dates: 17-18 February 2027.
Submission
Email abstracts/proposals to India-Research@vuw.ac.nz
Enquiries
Email our convenors - Dr Sita Venkateswar s.venkateswar@massey.ac.nz; Dr Jane Buckingham jane.buckingham@canterbury.ac.nz; Dr Nayantara Sheoran Appleton nayantara.s.appleton@vuw.ac.nz.
Registration
There is no registration fee for the symposium. But travel funding cannot be guaranteed for all participants. We have limited funding, and priority will be given to PhD students. Scholars based in Aotearoa New Zealand are encouraged to apply for funding from their own universities. In case there is a problem, please contact the conveners who can offer limited support. Overseas participants will have to secure their own funding.
Please see the Call for Papers for full details, including the symposium's themes, format, submission and publication details, and other conditions.