Paper short abstract:

Examining motivations and actions of first-time women protestors against India's discriminatory Citizenship Act shows how women brought their caring roles into the public space of their protest. Thus, women's responses to state repression disrupted boundaries between public and the private spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the motivations of first-time women protestors participating in the Shaheen Bagh resistance against India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. It highlights women’s experiences of protesting for their and their children’s citizenship rights, and the impact that women’s presence in this struggle has made to it. The paper reflects on how women brought their caring roles, hitherto carried out in the personal space of their ‘ghar’ (home), into the public space of protests, or the ‘bahir’ (outside the home) — thereby impacting the very form and nature of the struggle.

The case of Shaheen Bagh shows that state repression of citizenship was not accepted passively. Instead, violence by state personnel in public spaces (within a university setting in this instance) galvanised women protestors to stage a 100 day sit-in protest to raise their collective voice against this violence and repression. During this protest, the women protestors initiated and used a myriad of established and innovative strategies against this repression, most notably through bringing care into the public sphere. In this way, the paper shows that women protestors erased and deconstructing the binaries between the ‘ghar’ (private space) and the ‘bahir’ (public space). An examination of these strategies further reveals how public space of protest can, and must, co-exist within and in conjunction with the private realm of women’s everyday lives - especially for their sustained participation in feminist movements.

Paper short abstract:

Our paper analyses the transnational dimensions of social reproduction and argues that it is necessary to examine direct, inter-personal violence, as well as structural violence to understand the impact on Ethiopian refugees’ capacities for social reproduction, care and survival in Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on empirical research on Ethiopian refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, this paper analyzes the gendered consequences of refugee dispossession for social reproduction. Feminist theorists have paid limited attention to the transnational dimensions of social reproduction; the social reproduction of citizens is usually the analytical focus, and the liminal condition of ‘non-citizen’ refugees and asylum seekers is often invisible. However, the non-citizen, marginalised status of refugees in host countries is fundamental to their unprotected exposure to violence and their relative lack of entitlements to social provisioning, undermining their capacity for social reproduction.

Our analysis is situated in an understanding of the Kenyan refugee regime as structured by colonial legacies of racialization and categorization and entangled with neo-colonial global political economy strategies of managing ‘surplus’ populations. We demonstrate the centrality of violent dispossession to refugees’ ongoing experience of inter-personal and structural violence, show how it constitutes an attack on their capacity for social reproduction, and identify the ‘feminization of refugee survival’ as an important gendered consequence. We argue that theorizing refugee social reproduction requires recognition of a double displacement of refugee capacity for social reproduction, both of which are transnational. The first transnational displacement occurs due to their dispossession from existing support infrastructure for social reproduction in their origin countries. A second and invisible transnational displacement is the refusal of global North countries to take on the anticipated welfare costs of refugee social reproduction. Transformative and re-generative approaches to refugee social reproduction would need to address both forms of displacement.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages scholarship on 'survival work', anticipatory politics and 'complaint' to read and reframe practices of 'help seeking' by survivors of domestic violence in rural-urban India

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages scholarship on 'survival work', anticipatory politics and 'complaint' to read and reframe the 'help seeking' experiences of survivors of domestic violence in rural-urban India. In this context, survivors' complaints question and call out practices of violence and injustice, articulated through informal as well as formal relationships. Drawing on testimonies from 180 interviews with survivors in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra the paper examines the embodied and embedded work of making a complaint as 'survival work'. Work that is fraught with politics and power relations. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of Complaint! helps to reframe practices of 'help seeking' as forms of complaint and how these inherently political acts are anticipated, articulated and responded to (or not) and the relentless challenges of being heard within discriminatory family, state and and legal institutions.

Paper short abstract:

How do young people survive the intergenerational legacies of war, neglect, and violence? Based on ethnographic research in Karen State, Myanmar, this paper argues that post-crisis relations of care, belonging, and solidarity must be understood according to the biographies of those who enact them.

Paper long abstract:

How do young people in postcolonial states survive the intergenerational legacies of war, neglect, and violence? Based on ethnographic research in Karen State, Myanmar, this paper discusses how young civil society actors envisioned and built community during a decade-long ceasefire (2012–2021) between the Myanmar state and the Karen National Union (KNU), when the war had formally ended but its impacts were still being contested. My argument centers on the emic term “community” – an English loanword used by civil society actors even when they were speaking in other languages. “Community” referred to a prefigurative vision for building solidarity among war-affected peoples, distinct from the Myanmar state’s ethnocentrism and the KNU’s ethnonationalism. However, young peoples’ visions for “community” were often misunderstood by donors, who applied a comparatively apolitical definition to the term. Furthermore, donors’ assumptions about foregoing conflict did not square with young peoples’ experiences of growing up amidst war. I argue that the politics and antipolitics of building community – as well as other relations of care, belonging, and solidarity in the wake of crises – must be understood according to the biographies and lifeworlds of those who enact this vision. This has both conceptual and methodological implications for the study of post-war development.