This weekly digest is a collection of news, upcoming events and other opportunities from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University and the wider area, compiled for Graduate School students.
In this week’s digest:
- SASNET Panel Discussion: “Sino-Indian Relations in the Light of Global Conflict”
- Seminar: Unequal Exchanges in the Urban/Rural Divide in the Green Transition
- Seminar: The Politics of Gender in a Transnational Context – Roundtable Conversation
- Lecture: China-Watching: Global Knowledge Production about China
- CMES Seminar: Harvesting wind, stirring sands: the expansion of renewable energy frontiers, local resistance, and the European academic gaze on green extractivism in West Asia and North Africa.
- Lund University Academic Support Centre: Lecture on effective writing strategies
- Seminar: The Ghost within the Forest: Campesino Settlers and Environmental Ruination in La Chiquitanía
- Human Rights Lunch Online: The right to give rights – Welfare professionals as guardians of undocumented migrants’ human rights
SASNET Panel Discussion: “Sino-Indian Relations in the Light of Global Conflict”
Lecture
China and India are two of the world’s most influential rising powers. Both have experienced rapid economic growth and are vying for leadership in the Global South—but their relationship remains tense. From border disputes and military standoffs to competing global strategies, the rivalry between these two Asian giants is shaping the future of international politics.
- How do nationalism, border disputes, security concerns, tariffs, and global alliances influence their relationship?
- What role do the U.S., Pakistan, and broader geopolitical shifts—like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as the Trump presidency—play in this dynamic?
Join us for a thought-provoking panel featuring three leading experts on Asian geopolitics: Dr. Dattesh D. Parulekar, Dr. Rahul Karan Reddy, and Dr. Sriparna Pathak. Together, they will unpack the complexities of Sino-Indian relations and explore what’s at stake for Asia and the world.
Dattesh D. Parulekar (Ph.D), is Assistant Professor at the School of International and Area Studies (SIAS), Goa University, Goa, India. He specializes in issues of India’s Foreign Policy and Diplomacy, Sino-Indian Relations, and Strategic Maritime Affairs in the IndoPacific.
Rahul Karan Reddy is Senior Research Associate at Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA). He works on domestic Chinese politics and trade, producing data-driven research in the form of reports, dashboards and digital media. He is the author of ‘Islands on the Rocks’, a monograph on the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute between China and Japan. He was previously a Research Analyst at the Chennai Center for China Studies (C3S), working on China’s foreign policy and domestic politics.
Dr. Sriparna Pathak is a Professor of China Studies, and the founding Director of the Centre for Northeast Asian Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, (JGU) Haryana, India. She also serves in the capacity of a Senior Fellow, at the Jindal India Institute. She has previously worked as a Consultant for the Policy Planning and Research Division, working on China’s domestic and foreign polices; think tanks like Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and Kolkata respectively, and the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in New Delhi.
Date and time: 14 October 2025, 15:15 -17:00
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies (Sölvegatan 18 B), Lund University
For more information, visit this page
Unequal Exchanges in the Urban/Rural Divide in the Green Transition
Seminar
In this seminar – “And We Get Nothing in Return”: Unequal Exchanges in the Urban/Rural Divide in the Green Transition Eric Brandstedt and Georgia de Leeuw present findings from their project “A Just Transition to a Sustainable Municipality” (Formas). The project is a collaboration between Falköping Municipality and Lund University and is motivated by Falköping’s ambition to integrate social sustainability more systematically in their climate strategy.
An ethically defensible transition to a sustainable society depends on public support for transformative changes, but green energy infrastructures have been criticised and resisted for the impact they have on various vulnerable groups. Research and policy have started to integrate social sustainability and justice dimensions into transition efforts. The initially narrow focus on workers in fossil industries has been widened to include other adversely affected groups and individuals such as spatially impacted communities.
For the purpose of widening this perspective further, the countryside is an interesting site of inquiry since it is commonly targeted for green energy production. We study countryside sentiments about the green transition by examining a rural municipality in mid-Sweden, where rural residents see plans for an expansion of wind and solar energy as incompatible with countryside values. We show that rural residents display a deep-rooted sense of exclusion relative to centralized decision-making. Structural urban-rural power dynamics and grievances about disproportionate allocations of harms and benefits are perceived as aggravated by green investments. Here, these investments and the centralized decision-making that they are a result of are regarded as dismissive of contributions generated in the countrysidesuch as food production in times of crisis.
The draft article on which this seminar is based speaks to the literature on local governance and transition justice by examining how the energy transition is compatible with rural efforts to build a vibrant countryside. We contribute with a novel reading of the justice dimensions in rural-urban power imbalances in the green transition as a matter of reciprocity, or lack thereof.
Read more about Eric Brandstedt here.
Read more about Georgia de Leeuw here.
Date and time: 15 October 2025, 13:15 -15:00
Location: LUX, rum A332 (Blå rummet), Helgonavägen 3
For more information, visit this page
The Politics of Gender in a Transnational Context – Roundtable Conversation
Seminar
The Gender Studies Seminar Series invites researchers to share their insight on key issues for gendered and sexualized lives and knowledges, and to engage in critical discussions about the development of gender studies as an interdisciplinary and intersectional research field. Bringing together scholars from various research fields and theoretical traditions, this seminar series offers a platform for critical reflexions and new insights.
‘The Politics of Gender in a Transnational Context’ is a Roundtable conversation on the possibilities and challenges for gender research across diverse national and local sites, with a special focus on the academic institution and contemporary political contexts, but also exploring the role of transnational networks for building communities.
Didem Unal Abaday, Academy Research Fellow, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Finland
Jessie Taieun Yoon, Doctoral scholar, Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Lindsey Churchill, Professor of History, University of Central Oklahoma
Tatsita Mishra, Doctoral scholar at MICA, Ahmedabad, India
Moderator: Mia Liinason, Professor of Gender Studies, Lund University
Date and time: 15 October 2025, 13:15 -15:00
Location: Gamla lungkliniken (House G), Room 335, Lund
For more information, visit this page
China-Watching: Global Knowledge Production about China
Lecture
This presentation is about a book on global knowledge production about China which Julie Chen will publish in 2026. Her book compares the local, regional, and global politics of China-watchers from the twentieth century to the present, with a focus on the past and its connection to the present. There is bourgeoning literature on the challenges facing China-watchers and the institutions where they work in the contemporary era. However, her work differs by exploring the longue durée perspective of China-watchers’ conditions and the perpetuated interactions between politics and the knowledge of China being produced. There is a trend that China-watchers outside of the PRC have to show their distance from the Chinese state and other affiliated Chinese institutions to convince their audiences of their credibility and independent capacities to study China, even though not all China-watchers can professionally and privately disentangle themselves entirely from their study-subject of China. China-watchers are not just passive individuals constrained by the political climate and structure. China-watchers may exercise individual agency to make choices regarding what they wish to present about China to their audiences.
Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She is one of the editors for the highly ranked Journal of Chinese Political Sciences, under the auspices of the Association of Chinese Political Studies dedicated to academic and professional activities relating to Chinese politics.
Date and time: 16 October 2025 13:15 – 15:00
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Sölvegatan 18 B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
CMES Seminar: Harvesting wind, stirring sands: the expansion of renewable energy frontiers, local resistance, and the European academic gaze on green extractivism in West Asia and North Africa
Seminar
The CMES Research Seminar is the main collective seminar at the Centre. LU researchers and invited national and international leading scholars present ongoing research and analyses of a broad range of exciting topics of relevance for the Middle East.
Presentation by Yahia Mahmoud, Human Geography, Lund University.
Yahia Mahmoud is an associate professor at the department of human geography (Lund University). Situated in the fields of development studies and development geography, his research has focused on rural areas in Africa and treated several interrelated themes that are relevant for these sub-disciplines. These topics span from assessing the role of China’s foreign assistance in rural West Africa to the potentials of technical innovation to curb the impacts of climate change and poverty in rural East Africa. When studying these phenomena, he puts special emphasis on knowledge construction, history, and power relations. The overall goal is to gain better understanding of the process of socio-economic transformation, in general, and that of poverty alleviation in particular. In the pursuit of this, he has collaborated with researchers from disciplines ranging from social to natural sciences, both in Sweden and abroad.
Date and time: 16 October 2025 10:00 – 12:00
Location: CMES seminar room, Finngatan 16.
For more information, visit this page
Lund University Academic Support Centre: Lecture on effective writing strategies
Student Support
The Academic Support Centre arranges writing and study sessions for the University’s students each semester. You can read more about how a session works, planned dates and how to register below.
Part one of our lectures on academic writing contains tips and strategies for students who are beginning, or have recently begun, to write on their projects, e.g., how to effectively generate text. Part two covers tips and strategies on how to revise and structure a text as well as how to create a “red thread” in your text.
Part 1: Writing an academic text
- 16 October, 10:00–12:00 (in English, on site)
- 22 October, 10:00–12:00 (in Swedish, on site)
- 6 November, 11:00–12:00 (short version, in English, via Zoom). The link will be published soon.
Part 2: Strategies for revising your text
- 11 November, 10:00–12:00 (in English, on site)
- 12 November, 10:00–12:00 (in Swedish, on site)
The lectures are open to all students and no pre-registration is required.
Date and time: 16 October 2025, 10:00–12:00
Location: Genetikhuset, rooms 219–222, Sölvegatan 29B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
The Ghost within the Forest: Campesino Settlers and Environmental Ruination in La Chiquitanía
Seminar
In this seminar, Frederik Andersen Tjalve discusses the entanglements between campesino and Chiquitano communities and extractivist-fueled environmental devastation in the rural landscapes of La Chiquitanía. He begins by relating the context of my fieldwork, and how the figure of the campesino ghost settler evoked in media and NGO representations of the causes of ecological devastation and land trafficking in La Chiquitanía brought me to the San Martin Colonies, a cluster of communities with whom he has conducted long-term ethnographic research on campesino and indigenous territorialities within landscapes undergoing rapid agrarian extractivist transformations amid the political, socio-ecological, and monetary crises of Bolivia. He describes how histories of migration within the Bolivian Lowlands shaped the image of the campesino settler and White-Mestizo Cruceño resistance toward these communities and the MAS government, framing settlers as ghosts through the use of remote sensing and environmental governance discourse. Zooming in on the San Martín Colonies, he then seeks to rearticulate campesinos and Chiquitanos as actors in their own right. Sketching out how relations to soil, commodities, fire, machines, and community, territory, and the state are evoked within campesino and Chiquitano communities, he draws these metabolic entanglements together within the landscape of La Chiquitanía. He sketches out how extractivist epistemologies, through technology, bureaucracy, and the interlocal connections of agrarian extractivist trajectories, come to shape ruination and exploitation as an anticipatory response of campesinos to environmental devastation.complementary articles covering 34 OECD countries, the research identifies both structural and strategic pathways to reform.
Frederik Andersen Tjalve is a PhD candidate from the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, currently visiting the Department of Human Geography at Lund University.
Date and time: 16 October 2025 10:00 – 11:00
Location: Maathai, 3rd floor, Josephson building, Biskopsgatan 5, Lund
For more information, visit this page
Human Rights Lunch Online: The right to give rights – Welfare professionals as guardians of undocumented migrants’ human rights
Seminar
Across Europe, welfare professionals have resisted proposals that they should have a duty to report undocumented migrants to the police. This has been pivotal for protecting migrants’ rights. Consequently, GIVE RIGHTS will develop new conceptual tools for an interdisciplinary understanding of undocumented migrants’ rights as rooted in an interplay between migrants’ rights-claims and welfare professionals’ attitudes, practices, and collective contestations – highlighting the underexamined relational character of rights. The project investigates the politics of undocumented migrants’ rights as an interplay between different actors with converging interests: Undocumented migrants want access to their human rights – in Arendt’s words they want to have a “right to have rights” – and welfare professionals do not want to act as extended border guards but have a “right to GIVE RIGHTS”.
GIVE RIGHTS will compare Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK where the protection of undocumented migrants’ access to rights are, or have recently been, undergoing intense negotiations. Through its novel theoretical framework and by innovatively combining survey data with policy mapping, qualitative media analysis, participant observation, focus groups and expert interviews, GIVE RIGHTS provides a new research agenda for theoretical and political debates on the future of human rights in Europe.
Jacob Lind is a researcher at the Depart of Global Political Studies and the Malmö Institute for Migration Studies (MIM) at Malmö University. He has recently been awarded an ERC-starting grant. At this digital lunch seminar he will present his ERC-project GIVE RIGHTS, on how professionals in healthcare, education and social services approach the requirement to report undocumented migrants.
Date and time: 17 October 2025, 12:15 – 13:00
Location: Online (Zoom link)
For more information, visit this page