Dr. Mohsin Saeed Khan from Lahore, Pakistan, held a SASNET lecture on ”Selling sex without HIV – Pakistan’s HIV Epidemic” on Monday 6 February 2012, 13.15–15.00. The seminar was organised in collaboration with the Division of Social Medicine and Global Health, Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University in Malmö. Venue: Auditorium, Clinical Research Centre (CRC), Skåne University Hospital in Malmö (SUS Malmö). On photo along with Lars Eklund, SASNET, and Professor P-O Östergren, Head of Division of Social Medicine and Global Health.
Dr. Khan defended his doctoral dissertation entitled ”Poverty of Opportunity for Women Selling Sex in Lahore, Pakistan: Knowledge, Experiences and Magnitude of HIV and STIs” in 2011 at the Division of Global health (IHCAR), Karolinska Institutet (KI), Stockholm. More information.
In the seminar, Dr. Khan pointed out that the national prevalence of HIV in Pakistan is less than 1%. The HIV epidemic is concentrated among Injecting Drug Users (37%), and Hijras (Transvestities – 7.3%), meaning that the epidemic is concentrated among males. Has Pakistan been able to avert a heterosexual HIV epidemic? Is it a game of demand and supply or typologies of most at risk populations? The government of Pakistan has not financed the HIV programme since 2010. The contributions by global financing institutions have also decreased. Only 10% of the health care providers know how to correctly diagnose and treat STIs including Gonorrhoea and Syphilis. The hidden face of risky behaviours, denial, financial instability, global politics and security – have they contributed to the HIV epidemic in Pakistan. See the conference poster.
The audience consisted to a large extent of students and teachers from the Master's Programme in Public Health (MPH), run at the Division of Social Medicine and Global Health. This programme partly focuses on South Asia, and many of the students are from that area (Pakistani second-year students, Muhammad Ahsin, and Hafiz M Tayyab on photo to the left).

During his visit to Lund University, Dr. Khan also visited SASNET’s office in Lund, since he has had a special relation to SASNET. Till 2010, he was associated with SASNET as a member of its advisory South Asian Reference Group (more information).

In 2011, SASNET introduced Brown Bag lunch seminars, aimed at presenting and disseminating eminent South Asia related research at Lund University. The Brown Bag seminars were successful, and they will be continued during 2012. The format will however be slightly changed, due to the fact that SASNET now organise the seminars in collaboration with Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund (ABF) Lund, and Lunds Konsthall. Lectures will be given by eminent Lund University researchers as a lectures series, and be held once a month on Thursdays at 12.30. The new venue for the seminars will be Konsthallen, the public art gallery at Mårtenstorget 3 in central Lund.

Neelambar Hatti, Kristina Myrvold, Magnus Larson and Mariam Meynert will present their research in the spring 2012 SASNET Brown Bag seminars.

– The first seminar for 2012 will take place on 16 February when Professor Emeritus Neelambar Hatti from the Department of Economic History will speak on "Where have all the girls gone?" – a lecture on the ongoing gendercide in India.  
Abstract: Particularly during the past three decades, a new form of gender discrimination has become a frightening reality in India. In an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, girls are considered expensive and not desirable. Desire for smaller family and a strong preference for boys coupled with easily available and affordable prenatal sex determination techniques the incidence of sex selective abortion of female fetuses has reached alarming a proportion.  India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls below the age of six. It is feared that as many as eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade alone. As a result India has a biologically unnatural excess of males with serious consequences, not only for women but for the society as a whole.   

– The second seminar will be held on 15 March when Assistant Professor Kristina Myrvold from the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies will present her current research, holding a lecture with the title ”I'm a Punjabi-speaking Swedish Sikh: Identity Constructions among Young Sikhs in Sweden”.
– The third lunch seminar during the spring 2012 will take place on 19 April when Professor Magnus Larson from the Department of Water Resources Engineering will come and speak on ”Sri Lanka's vanishing beaches”. In this seminar, Prof. Larson will present to a broad audience the different projects that his department does that focus on various problems in the coastal region of Sri Lanka. The audience does not need any preliminary knowledge in the field. 
– The fourth and final seminar will be given on 10 May when PhD candidate Mariam Meynert, Division of Education, Dept. of Sociology, will speak on ”Children without Childhood”. Mariam is working on a doctoral thesis entitled ”Conceptualizing Childhood, Knowledge, Pedagogy and Research into the Postmodern”.
See the Brownbag seminar 2012 poster.
More about previous SASNET Brown Bag seminars.

2011 was the 150th birth anniversary year of the great myriad-minded Indian/Bengali poet, philosopher and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Celebrations were frequent in India and Bangladesh but also all over the world, including Scandinavia.
In Sweden, SASNET played a great role in organising a week-long Tagore celebration week in Lund already in March 2011, in collaboration with other organisations. Celebrations were then held in Gothenburg and Uppsala in May, and finally a week-long celebration tour with academic seminars and concerts, again efforts being coordinated by SASNET, were held in Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala in September.
More information about the Scandinavian Tagore celebrations.
Professor William Radice, who participated both in the March and September events in Sweden, also took part in a large number of other grand Tagore celebration events held all over the world in 2011. 
”Kolkata, Santiniketan, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad; Marbach, Copenhagen, Lund, Zagreb and Rijeka; London, Dartington, Cambridge, Birmingham and Hull; Stockholm, Leiden, Salamanca, Barcelona and Valladolid; Washington and Chicago; Kuala Lumpur and Singapore….Who would have thought when I started learning Bengali in 1972 that Bengali and Rabindranath Tagore would take me all over the world? The 150th anniversary of his birth has kept me and other Tagore specialists exceptionally busy in 2011, and the celebrations seem likely to continue, culminating with the centenary in 2013 of his Nobel Prize.”
In an article entitled ”Timeless Tagore”, published in the Indian magazine Frontline, 13 January 2012, he gives a broad overview of the exciting and fascinating events, and a hope that they will contribute to a new appreciation of Tagore as a thinker, and in the long run enhance the understanding of his creative achievements.
Go for William Radice’s article. 

From left to right: Sepali Wickrematilake, Mathew Luckose, Veena Iyer and Lars Eklund.

On 5 December 2011, participants from the Sida funded training programme on ”Sustainable Urban Water and Sanitation – Integrated Processes”, managed by the Division of Water Resources Engineering, Lund University, visited SASNET’s office in Lund. The programme runs every year, and always include professionals in the field from South Asia. More information about the training programme. 

Mathew Luckose, Regional Manager for the international WaterAid organisation in Bhopal, India; Assistant Professor Veena Iyer from the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar, India; and Dr. Sepali Wickrematilake, Consultant Community Physician, Regional Director’s Health Service Office, Kegalle, Sri Lanka, met SASNET’s deputy director Lars Eklund and discussed their respective work on water issues in India and Sri Lanka. It turned out that Dr. Iyer has several contacts with researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, such as Vishal Diwan and Ayesha d’Costa at the Division of Global health (IHCAR).