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CU Boulder cultural centers lose millions from federal funding cuts - Daily Camera Article

Elizabeth Williams — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:09:02 +0000

CU Boulder cultural centers lose millions from federal funding cuts - Daily Camera Article Elizabeth Williams Fri, 10/10/2025 - 09:09 Olivia Doak | odoak@prairiemountainmedia.com | Boulder Daily Camera

CU Boulder cultural centers lose millions from federal funding cuts
Asian, Latinx, multicultural centers seek help from community donations

The BUENO Center was notified in September that it will lose more than $3 million in federal funding for decades-old programs — a pattern of federal funding removal that’s disrupting the work of many academic and research centers at the ��.

The Bilinguals United for Education and New Opportunities Center for Multicultural Education aims to provide equitable education for diverse learners, and it relies heavily on federal funding to execute its programming. In September, the center received non-continuation notices for two grants, and the notices said the programs were not aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.

The center lost $1.76 million from one grant, which was funding the College Assistance Migrant Program, a 35-year-old scholarship program to help Colorado seasonal farm workers pursue higher education. The center has also received federal funding to offer master’s programs to teachers in rural Colorado for 49 years, but that funding is now gone with the removal of its latest grant, a loss of $1.32 million. Both grants are from the Department of Education and part of a five-year cycle, and in each case the department stopped the funding partway through the five years.

CU Boulder leadership has provided funding to bridge the funding gap for now, BUENO Center Executive Director Tania Hogan said. But if the university had not stepped in, she said, the center would have had to initiate layoffs for nine staff and two consultants across the two programs.

“In the past, we have relied heavily on federal grants for all of our programming,” Hogan said, adding, “It feels frustrating to not be able to get something that we already applied for and were awarded.”

“(The programs) give education access to two communities that have historically been marginalized,” Hogan said. “It gives opportunities to students … wanting to access college and get the holistic and culturally responsive support that we know BUENO can provide. For the master’s program for the rural space, there’s a bilingual teacher shortage, and by being able to provide not only the master’s degree but also the endorsements, we will have more qualified educators in rural Colorado who are already making such important changes within their schools.”

Now, the center is relying on community support through foundations and donors to raise funds to keep the programs going.

Hogan said the BUENO center is not the only center on campus suffering from federal funding cuts.

“It’s right now impacting so many different centers and communities that it does become overwhelming,” she said.

As of Sept. 24, CU Boulder had 57 federal grant terminations totaling nearly $30 million across campus. As of Oct. 2, CU Boulder had 1,821 active federal awards it leads or is a subawardee on. When asked how many of those grants were regarding diversity or cultural programs, the university said federal funding impacts on the university continually fluctuate, so it cannot provide an accurate breakdown. There are more than 75 centers at CU Boulder, which span a wide variety of academic fields and are organized around a specific theme or topic that conduct research, scholarship, creative work, education, outreach and service.

The Center for Asian Studies at the �� found out in September that it will lose $537,000 in federal funding it had planned to use for student fellowships, teacher salaries, Asia-related events and expanded programming for K-12 educators. The center focuses on the entire Asian continent, including East and West Asia.

The center was awarded two grants in August of 2022 that were supposed to continue through August of 2026. However, executive director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz got a letter from the Department of Education in September stating the center would not receive its final year of funding. The department said the programs do not advance American interests or values and that “the international and foreign language education grant programs are not a priority of the Administration,” according to the letter.

The grant funding allows the center to provide tuition and stipends for graduate students to study at CU Boulder and for undergraduate students to complete summer programs domestically or abroad.

“We will not be able to make as many of those academic year awards as we had anticipated,” Salaz said.

The funding also helped the center provide information, lectures and workshops about Asia to anyone on campus and funded salaries for faculty who teach classes needed for students to obtain certificates in climate and society in Asia and Tibetan and Himalayan studies.

“Those positions are at risk after this academic year,” Salaz said.

The center provides Asia programming for K-12 teachers and community college instructors to help them have a deeper grounding in Asian history, culture and geography so they have more context for what they might be teaching their students.

“All of those will be winding down more quickly, and we won’t have the same capacity to be able to offer those kinds of programs,” Salaz said.

The Center for Asian Studies is working with the university to figure out how to provide funding internally, but the center is also looking at private grants and foundations and working with donors and alumni.

“We need to ensure that our students are not the losers because these programs support the American economy, they support national security,” Salaz said. “We are living in a world where there are impacts felt worldwide for things that happen. We’re not in a situation where the U.S. can pull back from the rest of the world and handle things separately.”

The center aims to prepare students to enter a global workforce, for example, to have the skills they need to interact with foreign tourists or to lead an American company into a new international market.

“I have always felt like this is really important work that we do here because I think it helps make sure that America is in a position to continue to lead in the future globally,” Salaz said.

The Latin American and Latinx Studies Center was unable to apply for a two-year, $250,000 grant from the Department of Education after previously being awarded it in 2020 and 2022, after the grant program had essentially been shuttered, Faculty Director Joe Bryan said. The center was also awarded a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities so the center could expand its programming in Latin American indigenous languages, but that award was rescinded in entirety in June.

“They’re not big awards in the grand scheme of what CU brings in in terms of federal (money) … so we’re small potatoes in that respect, but it was absolutely essential to us for offering courses for undergrads, especially,” Bryan said.

Students enrolled in the certificate program may find that classes they need to take aren’t available, and the center may not have access to the funding needed to develop research and curriculum. The center also plays a role in the university’s mission to serve all of Colorado by engaging with Latinx students, a demographic that makes up a significant portion of Colorado’s population.

“It threatens our core mission, which is to be an interdisciplinary home for Latin American and Latinx studies on the CU campus,” Bryan said. “In particular, it threatens the viability of our undergraduate certificate in Latin American and Latinx studies because we needed these grants to pay for the instructor who teaches those courses.”

Read Full Article on the Daily Camera Website.

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Friday: Sharing with the Devil: A story of an Indonesian plantation, 1830s - 2000s

Elizabeth Williams — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:36:02 +0000

Friday: Sharing with the Devil: A story of an Indonesian plantation, 1830s - 2000s Elizabeth Williams Mon, 10/06/2025 - 11:36

Friday, October 10 at 4pm
Hale Sciences, room 230

The plantation system, a colonial construct, has outlasted its creators. This talk presents research about a paradox in the 200-year history of an Indonesian coffee plantation. Despite appearing highly productive, plantations over the past century rarely turn a profit and are often plagued by significant internal theft. By conceptualizing plantations as dual spaces: arenas of production and sites of wealth distribution, Pujo Semedi examines the tension between plantation owners’ drive for accumulation and workers’ and managers’ demands for resource sharing. The plantation is therefore not just a site of production, it is also a battleground for the concentration and distribution of wealth. How can a business riddled with theft not only survive but prosper? Could it be that internal theft, rather than hindering the development of plantations, is a mechanism that keeps them alive?

With Pujo Semedi, Professor, Anthropology, Gadjah Mada University and Fulbright Scholar in Residence, University of Colorado.

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Expanding career horizons through classroom outreach

Elizabeth Williams — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:54:29 +0000

Expanding career horizons through classroom outreach Elizabeth Williams Wed, 10/01/2025 - 10:54 Christy Go

Senior Isaac Kou—a double major in computer science and ecology and evolutionary biology, minoring in dance—had not considered working in education or with K-12 students until hearing about the Program for Teaching East Asia’s classroom outreach program. Viewing it as an interesting opportunity to develop different skills and give back to the community, Kou applied. Apprehensive at first, Kou blossomed into a confident educator, excited to share about Japanese culture and engage with students.

�� the program

Now having completed its second successful year, the Program for Teaching East Asia’s (TEA) classroom outreach program focuses on ways K-12 educators can use picture books about East Asia to engage students in cross-curricular learning. The program was made possible through sponsorship from the Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship and the National Consortium for Teaching �� Asia. Participating CU students are each assigned a book set in East Asia then work with TEA staff to develop a lesson, practice reading delivery and ultimately present a storybook reading and mini-lesson to Colorado K-8 classrooms.

This year’s program, “Teaching Geography Through East Asian Picture Books,” engaged elementary and middle school students in classrooms from Greeley and the Denver metro area all the way to Grand Junction. These students explored urban and rural settings in East Asia and participated in activities that included listening to the sounds of the city of Tokyo to identifying different types of rice, including finding the “imposter.”

Running from February to May, the program successfully concluded with several CU student facilitators participating in reading to multiple classes during a celebratory day at a local elementary school. In total, the program reached 49 classrooms in eight school districts.

The CU outreach students hailed from different specializations, not necessarily aiming for careers in education. However, all the participants expressed how teaching impacted them and became so much more than just presenting material to young children. CU students reported that organizing a clear presentation adapted for different audiences, practicing projection and enunciation through readings, and answering questions and clarifying points on the fly helped them improve their public speaking and professionalism—useful skills that can be transferred to future career settings.

Lily Elliott

Lily Elliott, a senior double majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology and Asian studies, challenged herself by preparing lessons for two books. Elliott was able to leverage her expertise in the sciences for the book “Rice,” about growing and harvesting rice in southern China, but she also stepped out of her comfort zone in preparing the second book, “The Ocean Calls,” about haenyeo, traditional Korean female divers. Working with a topic she wasn’t as familiar with prompted Elliott to engage in a different kind of reflection after each lesson and consider organization and delivery of the material in a more critical way.

Kyrie MacArthur

Sophomore history and education major Kyrie MacArthur, who also prepared for the book “The Ocean Calls,” relished the opportunity to prepare and execute her own lesson and reported the experience as great practice for her work as an educator. The experience confirmed her love for teaching; the program gave her the opportunity to work with elementary grades, expanding her thoughts about which grade levels could be her specialization. MacArthur's experience made her consider teaching upper elementary, as well as middle school, which could broaden future career opportunities.

Read the full article here.

The Program for Teaching East Asia at the Center for Asian Studies at CU Boulder is a member of the National Consortium for Teaching �� Asia and works to provide teachers with robust professional development about East Asia for application in K-12 classrooms nationwide.

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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 CU Boulder. The project aims to position CU Boulder 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 CU Boulder 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 ��. 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, ��
Post-1987 Education Reform & the Search for National Identity in Taiwan — Shelby Glenn, ��
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, ��
Orphan of Taiwan: The Importance of Identity and Upbringing in the Mid-20th Century — Hayden Fox, ��

Photo Essays

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

Long-Form Academic Essays

ADHD in Translation: The English to Chinese Translation Distinctions — Chloe Nowak, ��
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, ��

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 CU Boulder 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 CU Boulder 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 CU Boulder 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 CU Boulder 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

CU Boulder'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.

�� the Center for Asian Studies

As the largest and oldest area studies center on the CU Boulder campus, CAS supports a wide variety of initiatives to enhance the research and teaching activities of Asian studies faculty at CU Boulder. 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.

CU Boulder 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 �� 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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