The Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) at Villanova University invites you to submit abstracts for a workshop organized by Anusha Hariharan (Villanova) and Aslı Zengin (Rutgers). The accepted papers will be considered for a forum in the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES).
The age-old Aristotelian axiom that ‘friendship forms the basis of political life’ (Ward 1997) has always found purchase in studies of politics across the humanities and social sciences. However, the elevation of friendship as the ideal relationship that provides the moral foundation for democracy became expedient around the mid-20th Century. The end of World War II, and administrative decolonization across Asia and Africa not only illuminated social inequalities, but also gave birth to new nation-states. While the ‘citizen’ was the desired base unit of political life, the ‘friend’ was touted as the relationship category that spoke most to ethical life (Foucault 1997; Derrida 2005; Gandhi 2006; Roach 2012; Nixon 2015). The relational category was – and still is – seen to espouse the central ethics and values of liberalism: equality, fraternity and fellowship. Such essential values, newly minted nation-states believed, would enable fledgling democracies, like themselves, to flourish (Ambedkar [1957] 2011).
Concerns problematizing friendship have become even more pertinent and expedient in the twenty-first century, where it starts to form the critical basis for political life under fascist regimes that erode the human spirit and the moral fabric of communities globally (Whitaker 2011; Nagar et al 2016; Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Forster and White 2025). Ranging across History, Anthropology, Human Geography, Global/Area Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, participants are asked to center the study of friendship in the context of political activism, community-building and world-making, engaging with the following questions:
1. How do friendship relations form the ethical basis for political solidarity and human flourishing in the 21st century?
2. What are the different aspects of emotional, ethical and political labor required by activists and community organizers to maintain friendship and solidarity in the longue durée, and work towards social and political transformation in local and global contexts?
The idioms of friendship are also inscribed within the particular cultural histories and social dynamics in these regions (Ali and Flatt 2017) where friendship by default summons the category of the political, as friendship is the relational form that implies liberal choice is forged outside of the normative expectations of kinship and caste/clan. Further, scholars have demonstrated how friendship represents a form of social resistance to both normative society’s boundaries and the state’s repression of intimacy across ethnic, denominational, religious or caste-based differences (Tambar 2019, Hariharan 2025, Zengin 2026, Kanagasabai and Phadke 2023). Friendship communities offer us a glimpse of prefigurative politics, where activists enact the egalitarian and democratic societies that pepper their future political imaginaries.
This workshop will pay attention to these extant cultural idioms and genealogies of friendship, and in doing so, will further Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2010) invitation to: “create knowledge that is location-specific rather than location-bound”. Mapping friendship relations specific to the macro-region offers us new avenues to theorize protest cultures and the everyday life of revolution through the lens of intimacy where communities have not only survived political upheavals, but are thriving and flourishing owing to collective human creativity.
Please direct any questions to [email protected]
For submissions: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdElZvt7yWa9otyW4XpLp-28DXRM_cZ5gZs0x2y7QTNm4tfaw/viewform
Timeline:
April 3 Submission of abstracts (~250 words)
Late April Notification of acceptance
Early September Virtual participants meetings
October 5 Submission of paper drafts (~4000 words)
November 13-14 Workshop
January 15 Submission of final papers for review (4000 words)
Works Cited
Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. "Cartographies of knowledge and power." In Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, eds. Critical transnational feminist praxis, 29-45. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012.
Ali, Daud, and Emma J. Flatt. "Friendship in Indian history: introduction." Studies in History 33, 1 (2017): 1-6.
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. The Buddha and his dhamma: A critical edition. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Chowdhury, Elora, and Liz Philipose, eds. Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. The politics of friendship. New York, NY: Verso, 2005.
Forster, Laura C., and Joel White. Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities. Las Vegas, NV: Pluto Press, 2025.
Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow, "Friendship as a Way of Life." In Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, 135-140. New York, NY: New Press, 1997.
Gandhi, Leela. Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Hariharan, Anusha. "“Our Friendship Is Our Politics”: Feminist Intimacies and the Everyday in Southern India." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 50, 4 (2025): 891-915.
Kanagasabai, Nithila, and Shilpa Phadke. "Forging fraught solidarities: Friendship and feminist activism in South Asia." Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 7, 1 (2023): 02.
Nagar, Richa, Özlem Aslan, Nadia Z. Hasan, Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, Nishant Upadhyay, and Begüm Uzun. "Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation." Feminist Studies 42, 2 (2016): 502–19.
Nixon, Jon. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Roach, Tom. Friendship as a way of life: Foucault, AIDS, and the politics of shared estrangement. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012.
Tambar, Kabir. "Professions of Friendship: Revisiting the Concept of the Political in the Middle East." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39, 2 (2019): 249-263.
Ward, Julie K. "Aristotle on Philia: The Beginning of a Feminist Ideal of Friendship?" In Julie K.
Ward ed. Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, 155-71. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.
Whitaker, Robin. "The politics of friendship in feminist anthropology." Anthropology in Action 18, 1 (2011) : 56–66.
Zengin, Aslı. "Shelter: The Erotic Archive of the Lubun Everyday in Istanbul.” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 49, 3 (2026, forthcoming).