The GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside collaborating institutions, Jadavpur University and Hansraj College, University of Delhi, invite scholars to the two-day national conference on “Embodied Justice: Memory, Violence, and Resilience in India”.

The two-day national conference would incorporate, without being limited to, themes of memory, violence, and social structures to analyse how justice is shaped through these everyday experiences. Justice as a universal idea has remained central to our pedagogy as well as our everyday articulation. While the idea remains indispensable, it often bypasses the discrete lived experiences where people encounter indignity, exclusion, or misrecognition. The objective of the conference on “Embodied Justice” is to bring the two domains of the abstract-philosophical and the experiential-epistemological together. Rather than positioning theory and experience as separate entities, it invites a mode of investigation where concepts are enriched through everyday lived realities, and where lived realities are explained through reflective and philosophical engagement.

Embodied justice begins with the recognition that the body is the site of injustice and all the forms of oppression, such as humiliation and violence based on caste, gender, or race, are manifested on the body. Bodies inevitably become sites of affective response to these experiences through fear, grief, trauma, anxiety, and the like. These embodied everyday lived experiences demand moral minima and
reflexive abilities in order to make political claims and demand for justice. As a question of methodology, the embodied approach seeks to rethink and reconsider the sources of our knowledge in formulating the concept of justice. Instead of acknowledging lived experience as distant to theory, embodied justice recognises it as an essential component of theorisation. It argues that theories need to be developed through ethical reasoning. The philosophical reflection on the site where injustices are located, in turn, can address normative critique and offer conceptual clarity and imaginative possibilities for the future. The conference endeavours to create a space where philosophical inquiry, empirical research, and community knowledge can inform one another, each expanding the horizons of the other. Thus, the aim of the conference is to bring scholars from different disciplines to engage with the concept of embodied justice.

Theme and Sub-Themes (Indicative)

Embodiment, Citizenship, and the Everyday State

• Lived experiences: Citizenship, exclusion, and bureaucratic encounters
• Embodied experiences of violence, vulnerability, and political belonging
• Identity, memory, conflict, and the state’s presence in everyday life

Rethinking Violence, Ecology, and Moral Order in Pre-Modern and Contemporary India

• Gendered bodies and the moral order: Justice and hierarchy in pre-modern India
• Dharma and Adl and the idea of justice in pre-modern India
• Ecology, displacement, and justice in pre-modern and contemporary India
• Living the present: Memory, violence and the contemporary Muslim experience in India

Reimagining Justice in Contemporary Transformations: City, Technology, and Neoliberal Economy

• Urban transformations and justice
• Digital technologies and social inequalities
• Neoliberal economy and vulnerabilities

Economics: Histories, Theories, and Policies

• Historical perspectives on economic thought and policy
• Political economy of inequality, labour, and capital
• Sustainability, resilience, and inclusive growth

Embedded Trauma and the Psychology of Violence

• Somatic memory and trauma
• Intergenerational and collective trauma
• The psychology of fear, hypervigilance, and chronic stress
• Healing, care, and therapeutic justice

Visibility and Justice in Modern Indian Literatures and Film

• Progressive writing and socially concerned literature
• Literatures of the marginalised: Writings by minorities and Dalit literatures
• The modes of representation of violence in Indian film and bhasha literatures

Politics of Art: The Problem of Justice through Embodiment, Exclusion, and Identity

• Royal patronage and art-making: Art historical perspectives on power, identity, and resilience
• Artistic struggles for justice: Embodied practices of individual and community
• Art as an oppressive force, or is art always innocent?