Polis Project Conversation Series The Polis Project

This is the final conversation of this four-part series.

Photographer and educator Rishi Singhal reflects on teaching photography and visual practice to a new generation of artists and practitioners who are committed to producing and creating socially relevant bodies of work.

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative Commons License)

This is the third conversation of a four part series.

Photographer and filmmaker Laura Saunders discusses her work on the US / Mexico Borderlands, by interrogating the multifaceted histories of migration; and the colonial violence of the border as a site that produces narratives of criminality. Laura is documenting the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, an expansive fracking project that began in 2015. She has rooted this work in looking at "community resistance from the edges of Appalachia, where environmental and economical extraction has become commonplace."

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative commons license)

This is the second conversation of a four-part series.

Sinthujan Varatharajah is a political geographer, essayist, and researcher based in Berlin. Their work focuses on geographies of displacement and statelessness. In this conversation, they discuss the relationship between spatial politics, geographies of power, and statelessness.

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative commons license)

This is the first conversation of a four part series.

Bombay-based photographer and author of The Red Cat and Other Stories Ritesh Uttamchandani and Suchitra Vijayan discuss her book Midnight’s Borders, as a continuation of their decade-long conversation about history, memory, and photography.

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative Commons License)

Last year, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing had filed a lawsuit against Cisco on the grounds that a Dalit employee had been severely discriminated against by his ‘upper’ caste supervisors. While the US does not specifically have laws against caste discrimination, the California government used sections of the historic Civil Rights Act, which emerged out of the African American struggle against segregation.

This case has brought widespread attention to the issue of caste and Indian American identity in the United States. What makes this lawsuit historic is that it seeks the recognition of caste-based discrimination under the American law. It is this demand—its implications and the historical context under which it has emerged—that is the focus of this epsidoe. Joining us today are John Rushing and Karthikeyan Shanmugam.

John Rushing is part of the legal team which filed the amicus brief on behalf of Ambedkar International Center in this case. He began his career as a litigator at Sidley Austin LLP.
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S Karthikeyan is an IT engineer, living in the silicon valley. He is one of the founding members of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, USA.

In this conversation, The Polis Project’s Suchitra Vijayan discusses Prof. Craig Jones's recent book The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare.

Over the last 20 years, the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations and spaces that generals and commanders had exclusively inhabited. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become war lawyers. The book War Lawyers examines the laws of war as applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israel military in Gaza. Drawing on interviews with military lawyers and others, this book explains why some lawyers became integrated into the command chain.

Dr. Craig Jones is a Lecturer in Political Geography in the School of Geography, Sociology, and Politics at Newcastle University. He researches the geographies of later modern warfare and is especially interested in the legal and medical materialities of war and conflict in the contemporary Middle East. He blogs at www.thewarspace.com and tweets at @thewarspace.