Hydra Rising - follow up
24 May - 7 June 2024
Professor Nandita Sharma was a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2022 when she worked with Professor Bridget Anderson on the project The Hydra Rising. A blog post was written about this visit on the Migration and Mobilities Bristol (MMB) website here.
Biography
Nandita Sharma is Professor of Racism, Migration and Transnationalism in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research interests address themes of human mobility, the production of the state categories (and political figures) of Native and Migrant, the national form of state power, ideologies of racism, nationalism and autochthony, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. Professor Sharma is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the worldwide commons. She has co-edited Special Issues of the journal Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal (2015, 5(1)) on “Borders, Transborders, No Borders: Problematizing The “Figure Of The Migrant,” (with Cornelia Schweppe); the journal Refuge (2009 [2011], 26:2). on “No Borders as a Practical Political Project” (with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright), and the journal Canadian Woman Studies (2002, 21 (3 & 4) on “Women, Globalization and International Trade.” In addition to numerous book chapters in scholarly anthologies, Professor Sharma is the author of numerous journal articles, including in Mobilities; Anti-Trafficking Review; National Women’s Studies Association Journal; Studies in Political Economy; and The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Professor Sharma is also the author of two books: Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).
Summary
The Many Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic is an internationally renowned book written by social historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker that discusses the history of the disorderly mass that was opposed the emergence of a global system of exploitable labour in the eighteenth century. Professor Bridget Anderson and Professor Sharma have been editing a volume that examines the contemporary Hydra, by which we understand political struggles and movements that challenge concepts that were highly contested when international capitalism was emerging but which are now taken for granted. This include ideas of property, family, money and nation. Each chapter develops the ideas, relationships and actions described in a chapter of the original book, as they are now being made and experienced in the contemporary world. We are particularly interested in building on The Many Headed Hydra’s engagement with Bristol history. Professor Sharma and Professor Anderson will be taking the next steps in the edited volume that was contracted following the previous visit, developing a co-authored paper for publication in an international peer-reviewed journal and engaging with the MMB PGR research group.
Professor Sharma is hosted by Professor Bridget Anderson, Sociology, Politics and International Studies and the Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB).
Details of Professor Sharma's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course. You can also contact Professor Sharma's host for further information.
