In this presentation, we draw on the concept of uncertainty to explore the ways in which poor and predominantly low-caste villagers in India experience the state in their everyday lives. Through a focus on several social protection schemes in contemporary Tamil Nadu, we present ethnography of everyday narratives about localised encounters with bureaucratic processes and actors to illustrate what this uncertainty consists of, how it is produced, and what its effects are on the rural poor.

A critical examination of ‘post-colonial capitalism’ must begin by tracing the genealogy of the concept to debates about the late colonialism that post colonial capital is post. After the first decades of independent development, the study of post-colonial capital has been joined – and for many replaced - by ‘subaltern studies’, ‘Saidian post-colonial studies’, and the theses of Sanyal.

Welfare policies and direct benefit transfers have been at the heart of India’s political marketplace for several decades but the longer-term history of welfare in India is surprisingly little known. Louise Tillin’s new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) recovers a history that is crucial for understanding the current juncture of welfare politics and political economy in India.

Despite limited empirical evidence of its effectiveness, transitional justice remains the dominant paradigm within international peacebuilding frameworks for addressing conflict-related harm. The field, which expanded significantly after the Nuremberg trials and tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has faced sustained critique for its legalism, international imposition, and marginalisation of victims—prompting calls for structural transformation.

What sort of space is the gallery under contemporary conditions of political authoritarianism and “too late” capitalism?

The development process in India, along with its alleged achievements, has induced multiple difficulties and hardships for poor and working people. In villages, farming families confront an agrarian crisis, with rising costs of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, inadequate irrigation facilities, low prices for their crops, grave indebtedness, and ecological damage to the soil, water, and forests. Due to a paucity of jobs in the countryside, many are compelled to migrate to cities for work.

Though little studied, letter sutras help us recover the stories of love, loss, and mourners turning to the things left behind in the wake of death to make something meaningful. This talk explores Japanese medieval makers who reused and recycled the epistles of their dead for the copying of sacred Buddhist text to create potent palimpsests known as letter sutras – objects that have lurked beneath the surface of Japanese material culture and punctuated the personal histories of famous figures since the ninth century.