Workshop venue and date: New Delhi, 6-7 February 2026
Conveners: Harald Fischer-Tiné and Siddharth Pandey
In fundamental ways, colonial empires were all about mobility. The functioning of the imperial military and administrative apparatus, the production of colonial knowledge, the economic extraction of local resources, the export of colonial commodities were all based on relentless movement and circulation. This circulation, in turn, relied heavily on the use of various mobility technologies as well as on the creation of mobility infrastructures. It also crucially depended on the spatial movement of segments of the colonized population and/or external labour forces, clerks and military personnel, scientific experts imported from the imperial metropole or other world regions. At the same time, however, imperial formations were at pains to restrict or suppress mobility. Thus, the ideal colonial subject was usually imagined as being sedentary and immobile, whereas subaltern mobilities’ in general and the movements of potentially ‘dangerous’ population groups (such as nomads, ‘criminal tribes’, religious mendicants, diasporic anti-colonialists etc.) were seen as suspicious and in need of close monitoring.
In the spirit of the gd:c’s double emphasis on connectivity and the absence thereof, this workshop wants to bring together scholars of history and neighbouring disciplines that provide fresh and original perspectives on mobilities and immobilities created by/in the British, Dutch, American, Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial empires in South and Southeast Asia (and their respective global entanglements). The temporal focus may also be extended to the early postcolonial states that followed their collapse. While the ambiguities and tensions between forms of mobility and immobility and their relation to power may serve as a leitmotif, the focus of the individual contributions can be on the material, social, cultural, economic and political impact of particular transport technologies (steamships, railways, automobiles bicycles, tongas etc.) and the basic infrastructures (railway tracks, roads, docks) they required, as well on the movement of Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect certain groups of historical actors on both sides − and beyond − the colonial divide (soldiers, sailors, scientists, ‘peripatetic revolutionaries’, tourists and ‘globetrotters’, etc.) and the measures to control and check their mobility (passports, border controls, creation of surveillance networks). Another area of interest lies in the literary and artistic representation of various mobility experiences in travelogues, guidebooks, novels or films.
Application:
If you are interested in presenting a paper, please send an abstract (around 300 words) and a bionote of not more than 100 words by November 9, 2025 to both conveners, Siddharth Pandey (spandey_87@yahoo.co.in) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (harald.fischertine@gess.ethz.ch).
About the partners:
The Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) in Germany approaches globalisation through the lens of dis:connectivity. The term dis:connection emphasises the dynamic interrelationship between global integration, disintegration and (absent) connections. Both conveners are currently fellows at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect in Munich.
The Delhi-based Merian – Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP) is one of five Maria Sibylla Merian Centres funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). ICAS:MP has been offering short-term fellowships to distinguished scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences since 2015.
The Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies Delhi (MWF Delhi) by the Max Weber Foundation acts as an intermediary between German and South Asian research in the humanities and social sciences and provides a space for academic debate with and about the South Asian region.
Click here for the CfP for the workshop