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Paper short abstract

We analyse an NGO-led program of nurturing a sense of lived citizenship among youth in a small, peripheral Indian city. Connecting self, place and citizenship conceptually, we argue that engaging immediate social worlds deeply enables youth to develop a robust lived citizenship.

Paper long abstract

Young people experience citizenship in partial and informal ways, rather than as something fully guaranteed by institutions (Isin, 2009; Wood, 2012). Given the mutuality of self and place (Casey, 2013), we approach citizenship as a process that develops through the interplay between a young person’s evolving sense of self and their everyday urban life (Hall et al., 1999). This conceptualisation elucidates the multi-stage process for nurturing the desire, knowledge and capacity for civic engagement among local youth that Hunnarshala, an NGO in the small, peripheral Indian city of Bhuj, has pursued since early 2024. Youth form a socially fragmentary and politically marginalised constituency in urban India (Mungekar et al., 2025) and often have only ‘thin’ knowledge and understanding of the worlds they inhabit and take for granted. In response, Hunnarshala has sought to facilitate a deeper engagement of a cohort of local youth (drawn through an open process) with their place-worlds. These youth—mostly from marginalised communities in the city—have been trained in civic media for engaging, articulating, and debating their understandings and aspirations for their own and wider social worlds. Based on year-long qualitative research and participant observation, we argue that engaging place has catalysed a robust, critical and situated sense of self and agency in the cohort, evident for instance, in the phenomenological depth and acuity of intersectional critiques in their short films. At the same time, Hunnarshala’s crucial role in this process raises important general questions about the role of mediation between self, place and lived citizenship.