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Frydenlund Awarded RIO New Frontiers Grant

Elizabeth Williams — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:00:51 +0000

Frydenlund Awarded RIO New Frontiers Grant Elizabeth Williams Thu, 09/25/2025 - 12:00

CAS Climate and Society assistant teaching professor Shae Frydenlund won a $50,000 RIO New Frontiers Grant to fund the Planning Phase of her interdisciplinary project on geothermal development, entitled: New Frontiers in the Renewable Energy Transition: Mapping Technological and Social Dimensions of Geothermal Development in Colorado. Together with Engineering Professor Bri-Mathias Hodge, she will investigate intersecting social, economic, and technological dimensions of geothermal development in Colorado and beyond. The project emerged from the CAS Climate and Society in Asia workshop in Fall 2024, which convened faculty from Arts and Sciences and Engineering to discuss intersecting interests in climate science and social and historical factors in Asia with the aim of generating new connections and collaborations. The workshop brought together Dr. Frydenlund’s experience working with Indigenous anti-geothermal activists in Indonesia and Dr. Hodge’s experience in the simulation of power and energy systems, with an emphasis on the integration of renewable energy. This unique collaboration highlights CAS contributions to advancing high-impact research at ��ɫ��Ƶ. The project aims to position ��ɫ��Ƶ as a leader in geoenergy research by establishing a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary geothermal research center.

Frydenlund and Hodge ask: despite its potential, why does geothermal energy remain virtually untapped in Colorado? As evidenced by community resistance to geothermal projects and technological limitations, there are significant, yet poorly understood, barriers towards increased deployment. There is an urgent need to identify, map, and analyze barriers from multiple scientific and humanistic perspectives to support the timely and just development of geoenergy resources in Colorado. The project pairs quantitative and qualitative methods to model and map technological and social impediments to geothermal energy infrastructure development. By incorporating multiple technical, spatial, and qualitative methods, the project will generate high-impact data on impediments to Colorado energy independence. During the fall semester, Shae is supervising applied mathematics graduate student Jonathan Shaw to develop quantitative research methods and conduct a literature review. The team will also plan campus-wide town hall meetings to connect with ��ɫ��Ƶ geothermal experts for team building and to identify industry and community partners. During the spring of 2026, Shae will conduct qualitative fieldwork in Chaffee, Pitkin, and Gunnison counties, including semi-structured interviews and surveys of geothermal development stakeholders. Following the Planning Phase activities, the team plans to apply for the $200,000 New Frontiers Launch Phase grant to establish the research center, fund postdoctoral researchers, and build capacity to apply for other major grants.

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Celebrating Undergraduate Research: Introducing the 12th Issue of CJAS

Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:23:54 +0000

Celebrating Undergraduate Research: Introducing the 12th Issue of CJAS Elizabeth Williams Tue, 09/02/2025 - 12:23

Welcome to the twelfth edition of the Colorado Journal of Asian Studies (CJAS), published by the Center for Asian Studies at the ��ɫ��Ƶ. Since its founding, CJAS has celebrated the creativity and insight of undergraduate scholars by providing a platform for original research on Asia. This year’s issue continues that tradition, bringing together a diverse collection of essays, photo projects, and long-form studies that span regions from Iran to Japan and topics from religion and politics to translation, visual culture, and food.

Short Form Academic Essays

Gender and Power: Manifestations of Women’s Status in the Discourse of Reform — Abigail Ellis, ��ɫ��Ƶ
Post-1987 Education Reform & the Search for National Identity in Taiwan — Shelby Glenn, ��ɫ��Ƶ
The Sinicization of Manchu Women in the Qing Dynasty: Evaluating from Marriage Custom, Chaste Widow, and Manchu Clothing — Jiaheng Lyu, University of Texas
Local Deities, Lamas, and Festivals: Experiencing the Sentient Beings of Manang Valley, Nepal — Luke Stumpfl, ��ɫ��Ƶ
Orphan of Taiwan: The Importance of Identity and Upbringing in the Mid-20th Century — Hayden Fox, ��ɫ��Ƶ

Photo Essays

Focusing People Not Objects: Photography and Selective Narratives in Colonial India — Spandan Koirala, ��ɫ��Ƶ
The Female Gaze: The Aurangabad Photo Budget No. 7 as a Lens for Exploring Missionary Women and Their Work in Local Communities — Joy Mellott, ��ɫ��Ƶ
Understanding the East Malaysian Perspective of Local History — Samantha Choe, ��ɫ��Ƶ

Long-Form Academic Essays

ADHD in Translation: The English to Chinese Translation Distinctions — Chloe Nowak, ��ɫ��Ƶ
Farmers in Modernity: Local Responses to Agricultural Policy in Bhutan — Lorelei Smillie, Colorado College
Inventing an Empire: The Role of Migration in the Fabrication of Curry in Colonial India and Legacies of Food Colonization — Marguerite Laplant, University of Denver
The Legacies of State Shinto and Aum Shinrikyo on Japanese Religious Politics as seen Through the Unification Church — L.H. Scheppy, ��ɫ��Ƶ

We are grateful to the undergraduate scholars whose contributions make this issue possible. Their work reflects the creativity, rigor, and intellectual curiosity that define Asian Studies as a field and highlight the value of undergraduate research as a vital part of academic inquiry.

Now in its twelfth edition, CJAS builds on more than a decade of publishing student scholarship. This tradition underscores the journal’s role as a space where undergraduates can share their voices, challenge assumptions, and broaden our collective understanding of Asia.

We invite you to read the full 12th edition of CJAS and engage with the wide-ranging perspectives it offers.

Looking ahead, we welcome submissions for the 13th edition. Students interested in contributing can find submission guidelines here: https://journals.colorado.edu/index.php/coasianstudies/about/submissions

Sincerely,
The Editorial Team
Colorado Journal of Asian Studies
Center for Asian Studies

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How Asian American became a racial grouping – and why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 19:48:20 +0000

How Asian American became a racial grouping – and why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days Elizabeth Williams Mon, 08/25/2025 - 13:48

For the first time, in 1990, May was officially designated as a month honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. Though the current U.S. administration recently withdrew federal recognition, the month continues to be celebrated by a wide array of people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

People from the Pacific Islands have their own distinct histories and issues, delineated in part by a specific geography. Yet when we refer to the even broader category of Asian Americans, a concept with a deep yet often unknown history, who exactly are we referring to?

There are nearly 25 million people of Asian descent who live in the United States, but the term Asian American remains shrouded by cultural misunderstanding and contested as a term among Asians themselves.

As a professor of Asian American studies, I believe it is important to understand how the label came into being.

Read the full article here.

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The Center for Asian Studies welcomes beginning and returning students!

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:36:38 +0000

The Center for Asian Studies welcomes beginning and returning students! Elizabeth Williams Mon, 08/18/2025 - 11:36

Welcome to the 2025-26 academic year!

We hope as you get settled in to the Fall semester, you take a minute to get to know who we are, and you look for CAS events that might interest you.

Our Mission:

The Mission for the Center for Asian Studies is to provide a physical space where Asia-related interests intersect and find a whole greater than the sum of their parts, and where student and community-driven initiatives to embrace different world views have a home. The Center seeks to build a space where core projects of the university’s ‘academic futures’ are experimented with, explored, and realized, including student-centered learning, interdisciplinary teaching and research, and building an international culture on our campus and beyond. Recognizing that there has never been a more pressing time to understand this complex and diverse region, whether one lives within or far beyond its borders, CAS strives to facilitate active engagements with and within Asia, while making Asia as accessible as possible to the whole of the ��ɫ��Ƶ community.

The Center for Asian Studies strives to be a space of community, curiosity and respectful engagement with Asia. We view the area studies endeavor as a necessary yet distinct complement to disciplinary knowledge, and recognize the historic and geographic centrality that Asia has and continues to play in the human venture. Rather than treating Asia as an object of knowledge, however, we aspire to learn from Asia through self-critical intellectual inquiry, realizing a broader, more grounded, and more nuanced understanding of the human experience.

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Colorado educators explore windows to Asia's lesser-known nations

Elizabeth Williams — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:00:47 +0000

Colorado educators explore windows to Asia's lesser-known nations Elizabeth Williams Thu, 08/14/2025 - 09:00

This article originally appeared in ��ɫ��Ƶ Today.

While nearly every nation has a checkered past, reducing a country to a single chapter risks overlooking the richness of its history and culture.

Through a series of professional development workshops over the 2024–25 academic year, the South, Southeast, and West Asia Outreach Program (SSEWA) of the Center for Asian Studies (CAS) at ��ɫ��Ƶ helped teachers gain a more nuanced perspective on three conflict-affected countries—Afghanistan, Cambodia and Vietnam—and helped reshape how some Colorado educators approach global education.

“SSEWA workshops help ��ɫ��Ƶ scholarship and research expand and deepen Colorado educators’ knowledge of underrepresented regions in Asia,” said SSEWA Outreach Coordinator Hannah Palustre.

CAS ran the SSEWA program from 2006 to 2014 and relaunched it in 2022, through a $2.2 million National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Additional funding from the CU Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship and Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia allowed SSEWA to offer workshops at no cost to teachers, expanding access and impact.

“I recently learned that ‘sewa’ means ‘service’ in Nepali, which seems fitting because the SSEWA outreach program serves teachers,” Palustre said. “Almost three years after our relaunch, we’re seeing a growing number of repeat participants—educators who continue to seek global perspectives for their classrooms.”

Read full article here.

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Center for Asian Studies to host 2 Fulbrights from Indonesia in 2025–26

Elizabeth Williams — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:44:44 +0000

Center for Asian Studies to host 2 Fulbrights from Indonesia in 2025–26 Elizabeth Williams Wed, 08/06/2025 - 09:44

��ɫ��Ƶ's Center for Asian Studies will host two Fulbright visitors from Indonesia this academic year. This is the first time the center has hosted a Fulbright Scholar in Residence.

Pujo Semedi will be a Scholar in Residence in fall 2025. He is an anthropologist whose research focuses on environment and development in Indonesia. He will be collaborating with faculty and students and conducting guest lectures in geography, anthropology and Asian studies classes, as well as colloquium about his research on Oct. 17.

Alifia Moci Maritta is a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant in 2025–26. She will be teaching Indonesian language classes, organizing cultural events related to Indonesia and auditing classes related to her interests.

Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program

The Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program is a unique Fulbright Scholar Program initiative that is driven by U.S. institutions of higher education curriculum and teaching needs. Through the program, institutions host a scholar from outside of the United States for a semester or full academic year to teach courses, assist in curriculum development, guest lecture, develop study abroad/exchange partnerships and engage with the campus and the local community.

About the Center for Asian Studies

As the largest and oldest area studies center on the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus, CAS supports a wide variety of initiatives to enhance the research and teaching activities of Asian studies faculty at ��ɫ��Ƶ. These initiatives seek to connect and broaden disciplinary approaches to the study of Asia not only in the humanities and social sciences but in the environmental and physical sciences as well as professional fields such as music, education, business, engineering, media and information sciences.

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India and Pakistan once again step back from the brink

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

India and Pakistan once again step back from the brink Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/30/2025 - 08:00 Rachel Sauer

The original version of this article appeared in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

��ɫ��Ƶ historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent tensions between the two nations, incited by the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir, are the latest in an ongoing cycle

When a gunman opened fire April 22 on domestic tourists in Pahalgam, a scenic Himalayan hill station in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 26 people, the attack ignited days of deadly drone attacks, airstrikes and shelling between India and Pakistan that escalated to a perilous brink last weekend.

A U.S.-brokered ceasefire Saturday evening diffused the mounting violence between the two nuclear-armed nations that increasingly seemed on a trajectory toward war. It was the latest in a string of escalations spanning many decades between India and Pakistan, which invariably led to the question: Why does this keep happening?

Lucy Chester, an associate professor in the ��ɫ��Ƶ Department of History and the International Affairs Program, has studied the region and relations between the two nations for many years; her first book, Borders and Conflict in South Asia, explores the drawing of the boundary between India and Pakistan in 1947.

Despite President Donald Trump’s assertion that the origins of the conflict date back a thousand years, “that’s not the case,” Chester says. “I would say it’s mainly about Kashmir, with some additional issues at play this time around that changed the dynamics a bit.”

When more than a century of British colonial rule of India ended in August 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—a bloody, devastating event known as Partition. An estimated 15 million people were displaced and an estimated 1 to 2 million died as a result of violence, hunger, suicide or disease.

The first Indo-Pakistani war ignited two months after Partition, in October 1947, over the newly formed Pakistan’s fear that the Hindu maharaja of the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu would align with India. The Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971 and the the Kargil War of 1999 followed, as well as other conflicts, standoffs and skirmishes.

Chester addressed these and other issues in a recent conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

Question: These decades of conflict are often framed as Hindu-Muslim conflict; is that not the case?

Chester: There’s an older dynamic of Hindu-Muslim tension that definitely plays a role in this, but a significant aspect of the conflict over Kashmir is a conflict over water, which is really important. It has to do specifically with Kashmir’s geopolitical position and how a lot of the water that is important to India, that flows through India into Pakistan, originates in Kashmir.

It was a lot about popular pressure this time—Hindu nationalist pressure—on (Indian Prime Minister Narendra) Modi, which is a dynamic that he has very much contributed to. So, in that sense, it could be framed as Hindu-Muslim tension.

But it’s also about territorial integrity—that’s a phrase that kept coming up—and it’s a very loaded phrase that does go back to 1947 and the kinds of nations that India and Pakistan were conceived of in the 1940s and the kinds of national concerns they’ve developed in the years since.

Question: What role did Hindu nationalism, which has been very much in the news since Modi’s re-election last year, play in this recent conflict?

Chester: Hindu nationalism has been important in South Asia since the late 19th century, certainly, and it’s become more important since the 1930s. It’s one strand of the larger Indian nationalist movement—Indian nationalism was behind the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. So, it’s always been there, but Modi, of course, has really ramped it up. For a while he distanced himself from the BJP (the Bharatiya Janata Party political party associated with Hindu nationalism), but he’s since made it very clear that he is very much in line with Hindu nationalist ideals and played on those symbols and those dynamics centered to what Hindu nationalist voters wanted.

This whole idea of Hinduness gets back to the various ways both India and Pakistan are conceived of as nations. Hindutva (a political ideology justifying a Hindu hegemony in India) conceives India as a fundamentally Hindu nation, and that idea has gotten so much more reinforcement from Modi and the national government over last 10 years. So, part of what happened with this awful terrorist massacre two weeks ago is that it created a lot of pressure on Modi to respond in a way that previous Indian administrations haven’t felt they had to respond.

Question: In the recent conflict, India accused Pakistan of perpetrating the attack, which Pakistan denied, and framed the response as a defense of ‘Mother India.’ What does that mean?

Chester: Sumathi Ramaswamy explained it best in her book (The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India), where she talks about Mother India as this cartographed divine female figure who’s very much identified with the cartographic body of the nation. So, any attack on the territorial integrity (of India) is an attack on this woman, this mother figure.

The (recent) Indian Operation was called Operation Sindoor—sindoor is the red coloring that married Hindu woman put in the part of their hair—a call-out to this idea of Mother India and a call to the nation’s sons to be willing to die for her or to kill for her in this case.

In 1947, with the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan, the conception for many in India was a really tragic carving up of the body of the nation, and for a number of Hindu nationalists, that was a specifically female body. For a lot of people in India to this day, the 1947 Partition is this massive failure and an amputation of key elements of the national body. On the other side in Pakistan, for many it’s this great narrative of victory, but on the Indian side there’s this recurring existential fear that further parts of the country could be carved off this way. I think a big part of why conflict keeps happening is that both sides feel very strongly about defending the national territory because it was torn apart in such a violent way, and I think that fear is just most vividly present in Kashmir.

Question: How does the history of Kashmir in terms of British rule and Partition come into play?

Chester: In terms of British India, there were areas that were directly ruled and areas that were indirectly ruled. The indirectly ruled areas were princely ruled, and this is important because Kashmir was a princely state with a Hindu maharaja and a majority-Muslim population. With princely states, in theory they could decide for themselves whether to accede to India or Pakistan, and the maharaja of Kashmir, most would say he was angling for some kind of autonomy or independence and delayed the decision on whether to accede to India or Pakistan.

In October of 1947, militia groups—almost certainly supported by Pakistan—invaded Kashmir and the maharaja appealed to India for help. India airlifted troops in, because there was no all-weather road efficient for deploying troops, which gives you a sense for both how remote Kashmir was and parts of it still are, and also that there weren’t a lot of infrastructure connections.

So, the first Indo-Pakistan war was in 1947 to 1948, then a second war in 1965 and a third in 1971. This reinforces that fear of the country fragmenting and losing parts of the national body, because it was after the 1971 war that Bangladesh became independent (from Pakistan).

In 1949, India and Pakistan established a Ceasefire Line that became the Line of Control in 1972 with the Simla Agreement. The Line of Control is significant because it’s treated as an international boundary—not de jure (existing by law or officially recognized), but de facto. In 1972, officials came up with a textual description for the Line of Control and they define it up to NJ9842, which is the northernmost point on the map where it ends. The text of treaty says something like, “Proceed thence north to the glaciers.” This territory is so remote, so geopolitically useless, that no one at the time thought spending time to define where boundary line ran was important.

So, north of NJ9842 is this really undefined area—you’ve got Pakistan-controlled territory, India-controlled territory, China is right there, the Karakoram Pass is right there. What happened in the late 1970s, and possibly earlier even into the late 1960s, was Pakistan began issuing permits to international climbing expeditions, and in the early 1980s Indian troops discovered evidence of these international climbing expeditions. India realized that Pakistan had been exercising a certain form of administrative control over this undefined territory, and that’s what triggered the mid-1980s sending of troops from India and Pakistan to the Siachen Glacier. It includes what I think is the highest more-or-less permanent military base at something like 22,000 feet.

As a map geek, I find it really interesting that maps have contributed in pretty direct ways to these conflicts. One of the really tragic elements is that we know that on the Indian side, 97% of conflict casualties in that area are due to terrain and weather, and we can assume similar numbers on the Pakistani side. You’ve got these two countries fighting this battle, but they’re also fighting Mother Nature. In fact, the 1999 Kargil War happened because Pakistan tried to move some of its troops to a higher altitude where they could overlook an Indian road that supplied these high-altitude posts.

Question: What role did water play in the recent conflict?

Chester: All of the water that feeds the rivers that run downstream into western India and Pakistan originates in that region, which gives it real geopolitical value. One of the things that had me particularly concerned this time was India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty from 1960, which was a really landmark agreement governing the sharing of these waters. Some of these rivers flow through India before they get to Pakistan, and at this point India doesn’t have the infrastructure to turn off the water. But Pakistan has said if India starts building that infrastructure, they will consider it an act of war.

Question: Is there anything that makes you feel even slightly hopeful amid these ongoing tensions?

Chester: Over the last two weeks, both sides have been very carefully walking this fine line between being very visibly seen to acknowledge popular pressure on them to stand up strongly to their adversary, but also making very carefully planned choices that as far as possible avoided uncontrollable escalation. Everyone is keenly aware these are both nuclear-armed powers. I was very concerned that it escalated as much as it did on both sides, particularly in the use of airstrikes, but I think both sides were doing their best to leave themselves and their adversaries an off-ramp.

Part of the significance of (the Kargil War in) 1999 was both sides had just come out of the nuclear closet, so everyone was watching that conflict very closely, but both sides were able to walk back from edge. That gives us a lot of reason to hope and to believe that there are very professional people on both sides—in addition to people who are whipping up popular frenzy—who have a good sense for what the limits are, what signals they can send, and who are saying to the population, “We listen to you, we respect your grievances,” but they also know where the edge is and aren’t crossing it.

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CAS Executive Director Elected Chair of National CLAC Consortium

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

CAS Executive Director Elected Chair of National CLAC Consortium Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/16/2025 - 08:00

Danielle Rocheleau Salaz, Executive Director of the Center for Asian Studies (CAS), has been elected Chair of the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) Consortium, a professional organization supporting faculty and higher education institutions in integrating languages and cultures across various academic disciplines.

Salaz’s election follows CAS’s participation in the 2024 CLAC Conference, themed “Innovative Approaches to Support CLAC Programs: Leveraging Institutional and Community Strengths,” held at the University of Utah on October 25-26, 2024. Salaz, alongside CAS CLAC Coordinator Hannah Palustre, also presented a session titled “Positioning CLAC as an Internationalization Initiative at ��ɫ��Ƶ,” which highlighted how CLAC could be adopted and adapted by various campus units to support the university’s internationalization efforts.

CAS established the CLAC program at ��ɫ��Ƶ in 2017 with support from the College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Education Development Program and has since worked with 11 faculty members to develop 17 one-credit CLAC co-seminars. CLAC co-seminars allow students with language proficiency to access additional information about concepts and topics presented in existing Asia-related courses via Asian-language materials.

Thanks to support from a National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education, CAS currently offers annual CLAC course development grants to encourage faculty to create co-seminars that complement their primary content courses.

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Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:48:13 +0000

Kinship may not mean what you think it does Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:48 Bradley Worrell

The original version of this article appeared in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

��ɫ��Ƶ anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the ��ɫ��Ƶ Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.

“The literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,” she says. “There is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.”

The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb’s own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.

“As I’ve taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature,” she says. “We often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn’t take serious the fact that some people’s lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.”

Goldfarb’s solution was to spearhead the book Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book’s theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.

As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book’s introduction, “If family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?” The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Goldfarb about the book. Her responses were lightly edited for style and condensed.

Question: What is kinship, exactly? And how has the idea of kinship changed over time?

Goldfarb: The term ‘kinship’ is fairly academic and is taken to mean the systematic level of family relationships. In the old anthropology literature, it was about trying to discern what sort of kinship system each society had, allowing researchers to produce a systematic understanding of how people reckoned their social ties.

One of the reasons anthropologists cared about this was that they believed ‘primitive’ societies didn’t have politics; they just had kinship. Anthropologists were often tasked by colonial governments to determine these key social structures so colonizers could more effectively govern. …

From my perspective, now when we talk about kinship and anthropology, it is about how we think about relatedness more broadly—beyond just heterosexual reproduction and marriage. For example, if I ask my students to depict their own kinship networks, they may draw a genealogy, but when you actually find out what their real relationships are like, those may not be reflected in either their genealogies or legal documents. …

If you are just basing things on genealogy, you’re not seeing the foster child who is part of a family; depending on the local legal regime, you may not be seeing the same-sex couple; you’re not seeing the ghost of the grandmother who is still a part of a family’s daily life. These are all aspects of human life that you wouldn’t actually see if you are just looking at relationships that map onto a normative genealogy. So, definitionally, we need to be more open-minded about the ways that we categorize social relationships in order to analyze them.

Question: And the book specifically grapples with the idea that familial kinship doesn’t always carry the positives that many people tend to associate with it, correct?

Goldfarb: A very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are—or should be—loving, forever, unconditional and nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity. The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture.

In Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, authors seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to studying kinship.

In the ‘Ambiguities of Care’ section, we were thinking about situations where normative frameworks of caregiving were destabilized in some way, which often meant that care was delegated to nonfamilial others—so, either the carceral, the child welfare system, long-term care facilities or medical systems. …

For example, one essay looked at recidivism rates for older adults in Japan, where people tend to commit petty crimes so they can be re-arrested and incarcerated, as prison offers more comfort than life ‘outside’ if their family is not able to care for them. In those cases, they find being incarcerated more ‘homey’ than being at home.

The section ‘Toxic States’ is about the ways state formations shape the types of relationships that are possible, or that people produce in spite of these state formations. So, for example, one of the essays is about people who have been incarcerated after being caught at the U.S. border, and how American border policies impact kinship relationships and possibilities for connection and disconnection.

And the third section is ‘Negative Affects.’ The main idea in that section is that types of affect or emotion that are often considered negative, like anger or envy or favoritism, are actually constitutive aspects of how we understand ourselves in relation with others. …

My own essay, in that last section, talks about how in child-welfare contexts, the idea may be that family is a dangerous place; when children have been removed from their homes, it may be because their family of origin is not safe for them. From my fieldwork in Japan with child welfare institutions, I observed that one of the goals of those spaces was to produce what I call ‘sanitized relationality’—something that was not family, that was safe, not contaminated by arguments or worry and everyone was equal and was treated the same.

The argument I make in the essay is that that type of relationship is not the sort that helps people understand in adulthood how to maintain social ties. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things. So, it’s hard to grow up in a situation like that and know how to have relationships. To be able to argue with someone and still continue that relationship is a type of privilege.

Question: By extension, it seems that when kinship works like people envision it’s supposed to, it should be recognized and maybe respected because it’s not automatically the norm?

Goldfarb: Exactly. At least, the recognition that kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of work; there is nothing natural or automatic about kinship ties being caring or based upon positive sociality.

Question: How did the idea for this book come together?

Goldfarb: We had proposed a session for the 2020 American Anthropological Association conference, which ended up being canceled because of COVID. … When the conference was cancelled, we decided to do two online workshops instead. For that, we had people send in drafts, and we grouped the participants in thematic groups. …

"If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things."

We asked the authors to think about: What irritates you about the way kinship has been talked about in the literature? How can you think against the grain of typical arguments? …

For the volume as a whole, I wanted something that would be accessible to undergrads and good materials for graduate students; something that would be ethnographically rich and also theoretically exciting. We wanted these to be short, delicious essays of between 4,300 and 6,000 words, which is quite short for academic articles. …

And one thing that I love about the book is that there’s such diversity in the contributors. Some of them are junior grad students and others are emeritus professors.

Question: Who is the intended audience for this book? And, have there been any reactions to it thus far?

Goldfarb: As an academic press, it’s probably academics in general who are the audience. So, undergrad students, graduate students and faculty. But I also feel the essays are quite accessible, so I really hope that people beyond academia read it.

I taught portions of the book this fall in my undergraduate Kinship seminar, and the students have reacted really positively to it; some of them said they found it very validating of their own experiences.

We did a book launch on Oct. 24, where the first half was a cabaret performance by Ronan Viard, who is French actor and singer who lives in Boulder. His story is exactly what the book is about. It was about him being abducted by his father and brought from France to the United States when he was a child. The story is about his experiences with that, but it’s also about his relationship to the United States, where he lives now, and his relationship with his father after all these years, and his children’s relationship with his father.

It was a powerful performance, and it brought up all these questions that were at the center of the book, like: How do you grapple with the types of family inheritances, including inherited trauma, that are perhaps unwelcome but hard to escape?

Ronan’s cabaret also raises questions about belonging that are very anthropological: How do we theorize belonging? How do we think about belonging to a nation or to a family or a community or to a language?

Kathryn Goldfarb’s solo-authored ethnography, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-being in Japan, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

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��ɫ��Ƶ religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:38:14 +0000

��ɫ��Ƶ religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse Elizabeth Williams Mon, 06/02/2025 - 12:38 Bradley Worrell

The original version of this article appeared in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions

Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ite Islam, tends to be viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, particularly as seen through the lens of the ideology of the Iranian government.

Aun Hasan Ali, associate professor in the ��ɫ��Ƶ Department of Religious Studies whose area of focus is on Islamic intellectual history, particularly pre-modern Twelver Shi’i traditions, says he believes that modern perceptions of the faith have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

“It was an unprecedented moment in a lot of ways, because for the first time in the history of Shi’ism, you had a theory of government where the jurist was the head of the state,” he says. “Traditionally, there was always a kind of separation between those two spheres.”

As a result, Ali says the idea took root among some in the West and also in the Muslim Sunni tradition that Shi’i clerics were free to make whatever political or religious decisions they pleased, because they were not bound by the history of tradition. However, that’s not an accurate portrayal of how jurists and other followers come to decisions in Twelver Shi’i religious tradition, he adds.

Instead, Ali makes the case that Twelver Shi’ism is better understood as a “discursive tradition,” which, as defined by noted cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, involves researching foundational Islamic texts, such as the Quran and the writings of exemplary historical Shi’i religious figures, for context. Ali says his own definition of discursive tradition is tied less to foundational texts and more to how noted Shi’i religious figures interpreted those texts, as that is how most followers of the faith first engage on religious topics.

“In the same way that someone addressing ethics in contemporary philosophy needs to address (Immanuel) Kant, for instance, I view that as a parameter of the conversation,” he explains. “Similarly, when it comes to Islamic tradition, there are important figures that one needs to address. So, in the simplest terms, a discursive tradition should be thought of as a conversation across time and space among experts.”

In contrast to the idea that scholars make decisions based solely upon their authority, Ali contends that thinking of the Twelver Shi’i faith as a discursive tradition means the faith continually remains open to discussion, debate, mediation and modification.

Ali’s ideas on discursive tradition were shaped in part by his PhD dissertation on the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions, while also being open to integrating diverse intellectual traditions, during its formative years, from the 12th to 14th centuries. Ali’s revised dissertation was published in 2023 by I.B. Taurus as the book, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution.

Recently, Ali spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about the importance of the School of Hillah in the formation of Twelver Shi’ism and its profound effect on the Shi’i faith today. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Why does the School of Hillah take root in what is now southern Iraq?

Ali: Hillah becomes a center of scholarship for two reasons. One is that you have a (regional) Shi’i dynasty come to power that patronizes these scholars. The second reason is that you have the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which pushes a lot of people looking to escape that devastation southward.

So, you end up with a concentration of scholars who are sought-after in the region. People travel to Hillah from the Levant, from Bahrain and from Iran. They travel there because they were seeking expert education, and the major figures of Hillah were the undisputed experts. (Students) came there to receive that kind of education in the same way that today somebody might come to CU seeking a world-class program in astrophysics. The same thing was happening in Hillah; they came there to learn from these masters.

With the Mongol invasion, sure, there’s devastation, but there are also opportunities. There are trade routes that enrich particular families in the area, and, as we all know, education requires money, so the influx of wealth also becomes a reason why they’re able to offer patronage to those scholars.

Question: Is the School of Hillah equivalent to what we would think of today as a university or maybe a seminary?

Ali: Certainly, it’s different in the sense that it’s not primarily organized in brick-and-mortar institutions. It’s more unstructured. Classes took place in the home of an individual, a prominent scholar.

It’s similar in the sense of curriculum. What I mean is that certain texts come to be understood as definitive of a tradition. And that’s part of the reason why Hillah is so important. A lot of the texts that we think of today as being definitive of Shi’i tradition were written in Hillah and continue to be studied today, so we can think of it in terms of there is, not uniformity, but an expectation that anybody who masters this tradition would read these texts. In that sense, it’s similar.

It’s also similar in the sense of structures of authority. Just as someone wishing to put forth a view in, let’s say, American jurisprudence, has to engage particular jurists; similarly, somebody wishing to put forward a view in Shi’i theology has to engage with the views of particular jurists. So, structures of authority can be similar in that way. The idea of a curriculum can be similar in that way, but it’s not organized as a single space in primarily brick-and-mortar institutions.

That was actually one of the points in the book. The organizing principle of the School of Hillah is these large families in which particular types of expertise is concentrated. So, one family may have an expertise in genealogy; another family may have an expertise in philosophy; while another family may have an expertise in law. These large families (in the community) structure the School of Hillah. And, of course, people intermarry between these families, so it becomes a network of intellectuals.

Question: For the students who completed their studies at Hillah, did they generally go on to become clerics and religious scholars?

Ali: If we look at the contemporary Twelver Shi’i tradition, it runs the full gamut. Before you have modern schools, people learn basic numeracy and literacy in religious institutions, which is the same as it was in the West.

Some of those people, after getting basic literacy and numeracy, go on to become merchants or preachers, for example. A smaller group will become teachers within the institution, and then a (small percentage) of those will become the next generation of masters of the tradition. Most people don’t reach that level, because it takes a long time—we’re talking maybe 20 years or more—to be considered competent within that tradition. It’s a very grueling process, and most people leave before they finish the entire process.

Question: Can you talk about how your idea of discursive tradition contrasts with the idea of jurists having the authority to make whatever decisions they want?

Ali: That’s exactly the idea I was pushing back against in the book—this kind of free-for-all idea about authority. That’s not to say authority isn’t important, or that jurists don’t exercise that kind of authority. But again, they do it within the horizons of possibility that are shaped by discursive tradition, as a conversation across space and time.

And yes, there’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead.

Question: Were there any major developments or contributions that came out of the School of Hillah that made a profound impact on Islam today?

Ali: Philosophy becoming integrated into theology is something that we can look to Hillah for, within the Shi’i world. That development takes place earlier within the Sunni world, but in the Shi’i world, Avicenna’s philosophy, or Avicenna’s metaphysics, comes to be integrated into Shi’i theology. In that time period, the integration of mysticism into Shi’ism is also something that happens in Hillah.

"There’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead."

When we think of (Islamic) law, that’s really one of the most important contributions that happens at Hillah, and you see the integration of advanced mathematics and advanced science into law. For example, in Islamic law, figuring out the direction of prayer from a distance, given the curvature of the earth is also a complicated thing, which leads to advanced discussions of science and mathematics integrated into the chapter on ritual prayer, for instance. Those would be a few examples.

At Hillah, you also have the production of these kinds of biographical dictionaries. So, when Muslims evaluate a piece of information, part of the way they evaluate it is by looking at who communicated that information. You can imagine that it would be very useful to have a kind of a biographical dictionary, where you could look up a particular individual and see what they were like. Were they known to be somebody who had scholarly expertise? Were they known to be somebody who was an upright person? Or were they known to be unscrupulous in the way that they narrated information? These kinds of biographical dictionaries, which facilitate legal discussions and conversations, were produced at Hillah.

Question: Despite the School of Hillah’s contributions to Islamic thought, you say there is not much scholarship about it. Why do you think that is?

Ali: I believe a lot of it has to do with the history of Islamic studies in the West—and that only in recent years has Shi’ism gotten the attention it deserved. Previously, scholars who studied Islam largely dealt with Sunni sources. And so, even when they talked about Shi’ism, they were talking about it through the lens of Sunni authors and Sunni sources.

This is despite the fact that Shi’ites—while making up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the (Muslim) population—their contributions, intellectually, to Islamic tradition has been disproportionate.

Things started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, but even among scholars focused on Shi’ism, they have tended to focus on its origins, or trying to explain how the Iranian Revolution happened, so in both of those ways Hillah was ignored.

Question: Do you have any particular hopes for your book?

Ali: In general, the book has been received well. I think that people (in Islamic studies) recognize this was a crucial period in Shi’i religious history that hadn’t really been sketched out the way I did in the book.

In terms of contributing to a broader discussion, my hope is the book brings together theoretical conversations in religious studies with meticulous historical scholarship. In Islamic studies, it’s sometimes separated by people who do theoretically rigorous projects and people who do meticulous historical scholarship. I tried to do both, and I hope that the book contributes to bridging the gap between these two different approaches within Islamic studies.

Aun Hasan Ali, ��ɫ��Ƶ associate professor of religious studies, argues that modern perceptions of Twelver Shi'ism have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution, author Aun Hasan Ali explores the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions.

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