In this episode, collective members host Professor Ather Zia in conversation about the decades-long struggle for Kashmiri self-determination and sovereignty. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, Modi's time in power has been marked by increasingly aggressive settler-colonialism, intended to weaken the struggle for Kashmiri sovereignty. This has included an aggressive tourism industry that treats Kashmir like a playground for the Indian elite.
On April 22nd, things came to a blow when a Kashmiri separatist group attacked tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam, killing 26 people and sparking outrage from Modi's government, which quickly blamed Pakistan for aiding the attack. While the subsequent exchange of missiles between India and Pakistan has ended, Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control continue to live with the consequences of escalating militarization.
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies programat the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019)which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection, “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming titled In Kashmir:Writing Under Occupation (Agitate Collective). Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.
