UO White Stag Block to host South Asia conference

For the first time ever, the UO Center for Asian and Pacific Studies will be hosting the South Asia Conference for the Pacific Northwest at the White Stag Block in Portland on Feb. 6 starting at 8:30 a.m.

The conference, better known as SACPAN, is an annual event that provides universities and local communities access to experts on Asia and the Pacific. The presenters SACPAN hosts are faculty and graduate students who research South Asia, and they come from various Northwest colleges, including the UO, Portland State University and Reed College.

SACPAN’s first conference, in 1966, was held at the University of Washington and since then all conferences have been held at the UW and University of British Columbia. This will be the first year that any Oregon university has hosted SACPAN.

The panels at the conference are grouped into seven categories related to South Asia: religion and education, technology and politics, gender, politics and history, media language and literature, economics and development, and cinema. Two of the seven panels have been organized by UO Department of English associate professor Sangita Gopal and UO School of Journalism and Communication assistant professor Bish Sen.

The keynote speaker at the SACPAN conference will be Ali Riaz, professor and chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. His lecture, titled “The Age of Intolerance in South Asia: Contextualizing Extremism in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan” is funded by the Jeremiah Lecture Series, a foundation established by UO alumnus Admiral David E. Jeremiah, who passed away in 2013, and his wife Connie Jeremiah.

Registration has to be completed in order to attend the conference, and according to the program schedule, panels will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 6.

By Craig Garcia, Public Affairs Communications intern