KARACHI: Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts (SSLA), at the School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS), in collaboration with the Centre for Business and Economic Research (CBER), Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, organised its first departmental conference titled ‘Revisiting Narratives: Nationhood, Public Memory, Urbanity and Labouring Lives’ at IBA Main Campus.

The conference brought together seasoned and emerging scholars, field practitioners, government representatives, and university students to initiate a dialogue on revisiting global and local narratives that shape our lives today. Panelists and participants were invited from across Pakistan and the globe.

Chairperson SSLA, Dr Laila Sohail Farooq, gave opening remarks and welcomed guests and attendees to the conference. Dr. Ravi Ahuja, Scholar of Modern Indian History based at Georg-August University Gottingen, delivered the keynote lecture titled ‘Labour as a Political Category: Twentieth Century Trajectories in South Asia’, in which he traced the evolution of the conceptual category of ‘labour’ and examined its potential as a political category in India and elsewhere in South Asia. He emphasized the need to expand the concept considering current socio-political and economic realities to reach and affect labouring lives both ideologically and materially.

The panel titled ‘The Lens of ‘Labor’ in the Context of Pakistan’ looked at the analytical categories relevant to the legal and scholarly discourse around labour and identified the role of the state and political movements in creating the differentiation of labour and the outcomes of such a differentiation.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024