D Mcduie-Ra
Biographic Data
| ID | 57368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Mcduie-Ra |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcduie-Ra |
| SIGNATURE | MCDUIE-RA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5999-3850 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 253 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Frontier density in urban India
Urbanisation in India’s frontier regions challenges conventional understandings of the drivers, limits, and experiences of density. In this article I draw on cases from three cities in Northeast India, Dimapur (Nagaland), Gangtok (Sikkim) and Imphal (Manipur) to focus on three core dynamics of frontier density. First are the inter-legalities governing land, property and disputes. As urban areas expand into villages and other settlements, Indigeno…
Ferals and gentrification in urban Australia: Place, Death and Memory
In the city of Newcastle on Australia's east coast, murky distinctions between feral and native, public and private, domestic and wild are being delineated and firmed as the city rapidly gentrifies. The suburb of Stockton, a peninsula with deep working-class roots, has long been considered an urban frontier, a liminal zone for plants, animals and humans. Here, ferality is entangled with place, with frontier-ness. As the area undergoes changes in …
Smart Cities, Surveillance and Speed in Imphal, Manipur
Common across India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) projects are ‘smart’ components added to existing surveillance infrastructure, termed surveillant assemblages here. Surveillant assemblages resonate powerfully in Northeast cities where surveillance has been woven into the urban fabric for decades. Using Imphal, Manipur, I explore the following proposition: despite decades of crushing surveillance, enhanced surveillant assemblages under the SCM res…
Pandemic surveillance and mobilities across Sydney, New South Wales
In response to the acute public health crisis of COVID‐19 in 2020 and 2021, governments in Australia and around the world rushed to institute technologies to track human bodies with “live” surveillance. In Australia, “lockdowns” halted human mobilities in all states for different periods, and technologies for tracking bodies and collecting data were introduced after and between physical lockdowns. In this article, we analyse both the monitoring t…
Preparing surfaces for shredding: Skateboarding, repair, and care across scales
In cities around the world, skateboarders repair surfaces and objects for the purposes of play using techniques to fill, smooth, and fabricate. Research in social and cultural geography focuses on the ways citizens repair and care for material objects using do‐it‐yourself (DIY) practices. Despite continuities, repair work by skateboarders does not strive to improve neglected, absent, or dysfunctional infrastructure for the common good, as in case…
Skateboarding in the empty city: A Radical Archive of Alternative Pandemic Mobilities
COVID-19 ruptured mobilities within and between cities during 2020–2022. Empty urban landscapes came to define experiences, representations, and memories of lockdowns and ensuing periods of recovery. However, empty cities provided opportunities for play and exploration in subcultures like skateboarding. Skateboarders, among other groups, took advantage of relative emptiness to access known skate spots and to discover new spots, charting new carto…
Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India: Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South
This article examines the history of a similarity measure-the Mahalanobis Distance Function-and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial "problem" of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. Thi…
Play space in plain sight: The Disruptive Alliances Between Street Trees and Skateboarders
This article is an ethnographic account of searches for play space in Newcastle, Australia, specifically for skateboarding. Street skateboarding is predicated on unstructured play at ‘found’ spots in the urban landscape assembled from surfaces, objects, and obstacles. Without access to established skateparks during COVID-19 lockdowns, the search for play space became an exciting part of lockdown life, and street trees were surprising guideposts f…
Surface Tensions: Skate-Stoppers and the Surveillance Politics of Small Spaces
Skate-stoppers are ubiquitous objects installed on outdoor surfaces in built environments all over the world. Skate-stoppers are an essential part of low-tech security of urban surfaces at a micro-scale—a single bench, handrail, or ledge—with the sole-purpose of protecting these surfaces from skateboarders. As such skate-stoppers are an extension of human and electronic surveillance systems, though in many patches of the urban landscape, skate-st…
The draw of dysfunction: India's urban infrastructure in skateboard video
India's urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India's urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India's urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate vid…
Mobilizing Bodies and Body Parts, from Myanmar to Manipur: Medical connections through borderlands in 'transition
This article focuses on cross-border medical connections between Myanmar and Manipur, India. Non-state actors have been instrumental in creating the networks to bring bodies and body parts back and forth, first bypassing, then enmeshing, state actors. I focus on the movement of patients and medical samples across the border-from western Myanmar to Imphal city and back again-and the health infrastructure that enables it. Analysing these connection…
Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below
This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here 'below' has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city—from the ground up. Since taking to the stree…
The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries
Post-Soviet cities vary dramatically yet share common elements desired by skateboarders and filmers as ‘spots’; assemblages of objects, obstacles and surfaces offering the chance to perform difficult skateboard tricks in public space. Memoryscapes are desired as spots for their scale, smooth surfaces, in-built obstacles and aesthetic appeal on video. As more skateboarders travel to post-Soviet cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses, their reinte…
Vibrant memory scapes: Encountering memorials on unstable ground
Chasing the Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Landscapes in Skate Video
This article explores the centrality of China’s cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China’s urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industr…
The backroads of AI: The uneven geographies of artificial intelligence and development
Artificial intelligence is being reconfigured as a set of technologies that can address poverty with precision. The impacts of AI will both exacerbate and ameliorate the conditions of uneven development. Recent debates focus on the disruptive effects of AI, particularly to replication of development trajectories that have had success in reducing poverty. In this paper we further these debates by analysing the backroads of AI. The backroads serve …
Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim, India
Smart cities, backward frontiers: Digital urbanism in India's north-east
India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM) launched in 2015 has awarded 100 smart cities nation-wide, proffering funds, compulsory corporate partnerships, and new configurations of urban governance. Perhaps most striking are the ten smart city bids from Northeast India, a region shaped unevenly by separatism, military occupation, and heavy economic dependency. Smart cities in the Northeast have been awarded with key exceptions to SCM rules. We take this …
Delinquent Borderlands: Disorder and Exception in the Eastern Himalaya
In Sikkim, India’s model development state, the government implements wide-ranging control over its territory through laws, regulations, and coercion. As a border town neighboring West Bengal, Jorethang is a zone of transgression that blurs urban and rural space, migrant and citizen subjects, and licit and illicit activities. In this paper, we use a walking ethnography of Jorethang town and border crossings to make three arguments. First, as Jore…
Himalayan Boom Town: Rural-Urban Transformations in Namchi, Sikkim
Namchi, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is undergoing a building boom that is transforming a small district headquarters into an urban showpiece. Centred on religious theme parks and urban beautification, the boom captures Sikkim's emphasis on tourism as a development strategy. Growth in hydropower and pharmaceutical industries within the state, and infrastructure enabling this growth, seek to reduce dependency on the Indian government and have tu…
English-Language Documents and Old Trucks: Creating Infrastructure in Nagaland's Coal Mining Villages
In Nagaland, state attempts to control coal mining are framed as efforts to stop practices labelled ‘unscientific’ by the government. In this article we explore the ways in which communities create their own mining infrastructure built on networks of relations—materialised in English-language documents—and everyday technology—demonstrated in the prevalence of old trucks and improvised machinery. These objects enable livelihoods and supplementary …
(En)countering counterfeits in Bangkok: The urban spatial interlegalities of intellectual property law, enforcement and tolerance
In a Bangkok mall a fibreglass policeman warning against intellectual property ( IP ) piracy stands just metres away from vendors selling fake DVD s; a scene indicative of incomplete and unsuccessful attempts by foreign governments (the US and EU in particular) and corporate actors at enrolment towards ever‐higher IP standards – the “ IP ratchet” that Drahos (2004 Temple Law Review, 77 , pp. 401–424) describes. But the scene also reflects cultura…
Adjacent identities in Northeast India
In this article I explore the emergence, or re-emergence, of what I refer to as adjacent identities in response to changing circumstances for many Northeast communities in the last decade. In this paper I argue that it is important to consider seriously the ways in which communities in the region respond to the material and ideational changes to their lives in the present conjuncture by exploring adjacent ways of constructing identity in the face…
Policymaking ‘under the radar’: A case study of pesticide regulation to prevent intentional poisoning in Sri Lanka
BACKGROUND: Suicide in Sri Lanka is a major public health problem and in 1995 the country had one of the highest rates of suicide worldwide. Since then reductions in overall suicide rates have been largely attributed to efforts to regulate a range of pesticides. The evolution, context, events and implementation of the key policy decisions around regulation are examined. METHODS: This study was undertaken as part of a broader analysis of policy in…
Is India Racist?’: Murder, Migration and Mary Kom
After the 2012 Olympics, Bronze Medal-winning boxer Mary Kom achieved national celebrity status in India. As a member of the Kom tribe, a Tibeto-Burman community from the Northeast region, she has come to represent a region long considered, and self-identifying, as outside the boundaries of the Indian nation. The same week that Mary Kom returned from London, thirty thousand Northeast migrants fled Indian cities fearing racially-motivated attacks.…
Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail
This book has its origins in conversations, friendships, and an interlude.After almost a decade of researching and travelling in Northeast India and Burma, I have formed many close friendships in the region and with scholars of the region located in other parts of the world.The idea to study Northeast migrants came from conversations over akhuni, kaeng hang-le, and herring in the Northeast borderlands, Chiang Mai, Delhi, and Amsterdam
Fifty-year disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and exceptionalism in a South Asian periphery
Introduction to Special Issue on Armed forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA) in Northeast India
Anti-development or identity crisis? Misreading civil society in Meghalaya, India
This paper discusses the complex relationship between civil society and development in Asia by examining the role of ethnic identity in anti-development movements. Local and transnational movements by civil society actors against dams, mines, and deforestation have gained increased attention in academia and activist circles in the last decade, often used as evidence in arguments that development as part of neo-liberalism and/or state-led socialis…
The India–Bangladesh Border Fence: Narratives and Political Possibilities
The fencing of the India–Bangladesh border mirrors Scott's understanding of “final enclosure” wherein “distance-demolishing technologies” and “modern conceptions of sovereignty” converge to demarcate firm boundaries of territory from previously ambiguous space (Scott, J. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia, 11. New Haven: Yale University Press). This paper examines the different narratives surrounding the f…
The dilemmas of pro-development actors: Viewing State–ethnic Minority Relations and Intra-Ethnic Dynamics Through Contentious Development Projects
Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective agency of ethnic minorities opposing development projects, few studies consider the agency of pro-develop…
Is India Racist?’: Murder, Migration and Mary Kom
After the 2012 Olympics, Bronze Medal-winning boxer Mary Kom achieved national celebrity status in India. As a member of the Kom tribe, a Tibeto-Burman community from the Northeast region, she has come to represent a region long considered, and self-identifying, as outside the boundaries of the Indian nation. The same week that Mary Kom returned from London, thirty thousand Northeast migrants fled Indian cities fearing racially-motivated attacks.…
Cosmopolitan Tribals: Frontier Migrants In Delhi
Based on fieldwork, this article examines various aspects of tribal migration from the Northeast frontier of India to Delhi, a phenomenon which increased rapidly in the last half decade or so. This offers insights into four important interlinked processes. First, such migration indicates significant changes taking place in the Northeast itself. While many migrants leave the region to escape conflict, many more simply seek to find work, pursue edu…
Between National Security and Ethno-nationalism: The Regional Politics of Development in Northeast India
Although scholarly interest in Northeast India is growing there is still relatively little discussion of the high levels of poverty in the region and the failures of development. When mentioned they are viewed instrumentally as causes and/or symptoms of ongoing insurgency and counter-insurgency. However this does not fully explain how a region that receives an extraordinarily large amount of development funding from the Indian Government, has its…
Surface Tensions: Skate-Stoppers and the Surveillance Politics of Small Spaces
Skate-stoppers are ubiquitous objects installed on outdoor surfaces in built environments all over the world. Skate-stoppers are an essential part of low-tech security of urban surfaces at a micro-scale—a single bench, handrail, or ledge—with the sole-purpose of protecting these surfaces from skateboarders. As such skate-stoppers are an extension of human and electronic surveillance systems, though in many patches of the urban landscape, skate-st…
Play space in plain sight: The Disruptive Alliances Between Street Trees and Skateboarders
This article is an ethnographic account of searches for play space in Newcastle, Australia, specifically for skateboarding. Street skateboarding is predicated on unstructured play at ‘found’ spots in the urban landscape assembled from surfaces, objects, and obstacles. Without access to established skateparks during COVID-19 lockdowns, the search for play space became an exciting part of lockdown life, and street trees were surprising guideposts f…
Adjacent identities in Northeast India
In this article I explore the emergence, or re-emergence, of what I refer to as adjacent identities in response to changing circumstances for many Northeast communities in the last decade. In this paper I argue that it is important to consider seriously the ways in which communities in the region respond to the material and ideational changes to their lives in the present conjuncture by exploring adjacent ways of constructing identity in the face…
Beyond the ‘Exclusionary City’: North-east Migrants in Neo-liberal Delhi
Scholars have noted the ways in which Delhi’s transformation into a global city has enclosed urban spaces excluding the urban poor, labourers and migrants. One of the neglected aspects of this focus is the way in which Delhi’s transformation has created new opportunities for migrants from north-east India. This article is an ethnographic account of migrants from the north-east in Delhi. It is argued that employment opportunities in the neo-libera…
Vision 2020 or re-vision 1958: The contradictory politics of counter-insurgency in India's regional engagement
Insurgency in Northeast India has long been explained as an outcome of poverty and isolation that in turn produces further poverty and militancy. In order to break this cycle and achieve 'peace and prosperity', the Indian Government released North Eastern Region Vision 2020 in July 2008 – a comprehensive policy agenda to achieve 'peace and prosperity' in the Northeast. This is to be realised through deeper economic and political engagement with n…
Skateboarding in the empty city: A Radical Archive of Alternative Pandemic Mobilities
COVID-19 ruptured mobilities within and between cities during 2020–2022. Empty urban landscapes came to define experiences, representations, and memories of lockdowns and ensuing periods of recovery. However, empty cities provided opportunities for play and exploration in subcultures like skateboarding. Skateboarders, among other groups, took advantage of relative emptiness to access known skate spots and to discover new spots, charting new carto…
Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim, India
Civil society organisations and human security: Transcending constricted space in Meghalaya
This paper examines the limitations on civil society organisations (CSOs) in India's Northeast, specifically the state of Meghalaya, and suggests some strategies they must pursue to overcome them. The majority of literature concerning the Northeast tends to focus on national security, insurgency and violence, with a limited analysis of the role of CSOs and the human security of people living in these circumstances. CSOs in the Northeast face rest…
Chasing the Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Landscapes in Skate Video
This article explores the centrality of China’s cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China’s urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industr…
Smart cities, backward frontiers: Digital urbanism in India's north-east
India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM) launched in 2015 has awarded 100 smart cities nation-wide, proffering funds, compulsory corporate partnerships, and new configurations of urban governance. Perhaps most striking are the ten smart city bids from Northeast India, a region shaped unevenly by separatism, military occupation, and heavy economic dependency. Smart cities in the Northeast have been awarded with key exceptions to SCM rules. We take this …
(En)countering counterfeits in Bangkok: The urban spatial interlegalities of intellectual property law, enforcement and tolerance
In a Bangkok mall a fibreglass policeman warning against intellectual property ( IP ) piracy stands just metres away from vendors selling fake DVD s; a scene indicative of incomplete and unsuccessful attempts by foreign governments (the US and EU in particular) and corporate actors at enrolment towards ever‐higher IP standards – the “ IP ratchet” that Drahos (2004 Temple Law Review, 77 , pp. 401–424) describes. But the scene also reflects cultura…
Ethnicity and place in a ‘disturbed city: Ways of belonging in Imphal, Manipur
This article explores the relationships between ethnicity, place and belonging in the city of Imphal, capital of the state of Manipur in India’s Northeast border region. Manipur has experienced decades of conflict from ethno-nationalist separatism, inter-ethnic territorial disputes and counter-insurgency operations. These ethnic conflicts play out on the urban landscape of Imphal. Control of the city from above is diffused among the civilian gove…
Tribals, migrants and insurgents: Security and insecurity along the India–Bangladesh border
The fencing of the India–Bangladesh border suggests finality in the territorial partitioning of South Asia. This article examines the converging and competing narratives surrounding the fence at the national level in India and in the borderland itself, focussing on the federal state of Meghalaya. From this comparison two main arguments are made. First, at the national level, narratives around migration, national security, counterinsurgency and tr…
Violence Against Women in the Militarized Indian Frontier: Beyond “Indian Culture” in the Experiences of Ethnic Minority Women
Violence against women (VAW) in India is commonly attributed to an overarching metacultural patriarchal framework. Focusing on this national culture of violence obscures the experiences of VAW among ethnic minority women. This article focuses on VAW in Northeast India, a region populated by large numbers of Scheduled Tribes with different cultural norms, and where society has become militarized by ongoing insurgency and counterinsurgency. Though …
Leaving the Militarized Frontier: Migration and Tribal Masculinity in Delhi
In this article, the author examines the challenges to masculinity prompted by migration from the Northeast frontier of India to the capital city Delhi. Northeast India has been characterized by insurgency, counterinsurgency, and ethno-nationalism since Indian Independence in 1947. In this militarized environment, masculinity has been shaped by historical constructions of a warrior past fused with contemporary constructions based on ethno-nationa…
Vibrant memory scapes: Encountering memorials on unstable ground
Preparing surfaces for shredding: Skateboarding, repair, and care across scales
In cities around the world, skateboarders repair surfaces and objects for the purposes of play using techniques to fill, smooth, and fabricate. Research in social and cultural geography focuses on the ways citizens repair and care for material objects using do‐it‐yourself (DIY) practices. Despite continuities, repair work by skateboarders does not strive to improve neglected, absent, or dysfunctional infrastructure for the common good, as in case…
Civil society organisations and human security: Transcending constricted space in Meghalaya
This paper examines the limitations on civil society organisations (CSOs) in India's Northeast, specifically the state of Meghalaya, and suggests some strategies they must pursue to overcome them. The majority of literature concerning the Northeast tends to focus on national security, insurgency and violence, with a limited analysis of the role of CSOs and the human security of people living in these circumstances. CSOs in the Northeast face rest…
Anti-development or identity crisis? Misreading civil society in Meghalaya, India
This paper discusses the complex relationship between civil society and development in Asia by examining the role of ethnic identity in anti-development movements. Local and transnational movements by civil society actors against dams, mines, and deforestation have gained increased attention in academia and activist circles in the last decade, often used as evidence in arguments that development as part of neo-liberalism and/or state-led socialis…
Between National Security and Ethno-nationalism: The Regional Politics of Development in Northeast India
Although scholarly interest in Northeast India is growing there is still relatively little discussion of the high levels of poverty in the region and the failures of development. When mentioned they are viewed instrumentally as causes and/or symptoms of ongoing insurgency and counter-insurgency. However this does not fully explain how a region that receives an extraordinarily large amount of development funding from the Indian Government, has its…
Fifty-year disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and exceptionalism in a South Asian periphery
Introduction to Special Issue on Armed forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA) in Northeast India
Vision 2020 or re-vision 1958: The contradictory politics of counter-insurgency in India's regional engagement
Insurgency in Northeast India has long been explained as an outcome of poverty and isolation that in turn produces further poverty and militancy. In order to break this cycle and achieve 'peace and prosperity', the Indian Government released North Eastern Region Vision 2020 in July 2008 – a comprehensive policy agenda to achieve 'peace and prosperity' in the Northeast. This is to be realised through deeper economic and political engagement with n…
Religious actors, civil society and the development agenda: The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion
This article uses the World Bank's engagement with religious actors to analyse their differentiated role in setting the development agenda raising three key issues. First, engagements between international financial institutions (IFIs) and religious actors are formalised thus excluding many of the actors embedded within communities in the South. Secondly, the varied politics of religious actors in development are rarely articulated and a single p…
The dilemmas of pro-development actors: Viewing State–ethnic Minority Relations and Intra-Ethnic Dynamics Through Contentious Development Projects
Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective agency of ethnic minorities opposing development projects, few studies consider the agency of pro-develop…
Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail
Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail is an ethnographic study of migrants from India's north-east border region living and working in Delhi, the nation's capital. Northeast India borders China, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Despite burgeoning interest in the region, little attention is given to the thousands of migrants leaving the region for Indian cities for refuge, work, and study. The stories of Northeast migrants reveal …
Tribals, migrants and insurgents: Security and insecurity along the India–Bangladesh border
The fencing of the India–Bangladesh border suggests finality in the territorial partitioning of South Asia. This article examines the converging and competing narratives surrounding the fence at the national level in India and in the borderland itself, focussing on the federal state of Meghalaya. From this comparison two main arguments are made. First, at the national level, narratives around migration, national security, counterinsurgency and tr…
Violence Against Women in the Militarized Indian Frontier: Beyond “Indian Culture” in the Experiences of Ethnic Minority Women
Violence against women (VAW) in India is commonly attributed to an overarching metacultural patriarchal framework. Focusing on this national culture of violence obscures the experiences of VAW among ethnic minority women. This article focuses on VAW in Northeast India, a region populated by large numbers of Scheduled Tribes with different cultural norms, and where society has become militarized by ongoing insurgency and counterinsurgency. Though …
The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance
The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance." Asian Studies Review, 36(4), pp. 593–594
Cosmopolitan Tribals: Frontier Migrants In Delhi
Based on fieldwork, this article examines various aspects of tribal migration from the Northeast frontier of India to Delhi, a phenomenon which increased rapidly in the last half decade or so. This offers insights into four important interlinked processes. First, such migration indicates significant changes taking place in the Northeast itself. While many migrants leave the region to escape conflict, many more simply seek to find work, pursue edu…
Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail
This book has its origins in conversations, friendships, and an interlude.After almost a decade of researching and travelling in Northeast India and Burma, I have formed many close friendships in the region and with scholars of the region located in other parts of the world.The idea to study Northeast migrants came from conversations over akhuni, kaeng hang-le, and herring in the Northeast borderlands, Chiang Mai, Delhi, and Amsterdam
Leaving the Militarized Frontier: Migration and Tribal Masculinity in Delhi
In this article, the author examines the challenges to masculinity prompted by migration from the Northeast frontier of India to the capital city Delhi. Northeast India has been characterized by insurgency, counterinsurgency, and ethno-nationalism since Indian Independence in 1947. In this militarized environment, masculinity has been shaped by historical constructions of a warrior past fused with contemporary constructions based on ethno-nationa…
Being a tribal man from the North-East: Migration, morality, and masculinity
In this article I analyse the ways masculinity is expressed among tribal migrants from the Northeast frontier of India living in Delhi. Unlike many other groups in India who have long histories of migration and return within and outside the country, tribal migration out of the Northeast in large numbers is a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, men and women are migrating out of the Northeast in more or less equal numbers. Masculinity is being reshape…
Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority in Contemporary Laos
Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority in Contemporary Laos." Asian Studies Review, 37(1), pp. 119–120
Beyond the ‘Exclusionary City’: North-east Migrants in Neo-liberal Delhi
Scholars have noted the ways in which Delhi’s transformation into a global city has enclosed urban spaces excluding the urban poor, labourers and migrants. One of the neglected aspects of this focus is the way in which Delhi’s transformation has created new opportunities for migrants from north-east India. This article is an ethnographic account of migrants from the north-east in Delhi. It is argued that employment opportunities in the neo-libera…
Spatial dysfunction in post-tsunami Baan Lion: Taking the Moken beyond vulnerability and tradition
Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, The Rumor of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins
The task set out in The Rumor of Globalization is a welcome one. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay seeks to re-tell globalisation in India through an exploration of a shared vernacular imaginary of the ‘global’
The India–Bangladesh Border Fence: Narratives and Political Possibilities
The fencing of the India–Bangladesh border mirrors Scott's understanding of “final enclosure” wherein “distance-demolishing technologies” and “modern conceptions of sovereignty” converge to demarcate firm boundaries of territory from previously ambiguous space (Scott, J. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia, 11. New Haven: Yale University Press). This paper examines the different narratives surrounding the f…
Ethnicity and place in a ‘disturbed city: Ways of belonging in Imphal, Manipur
This article explores the relationships between ethnicity, place and belonging in the city of Imphal, capital of the state of Manipur in India’s Northeast border region. Manipur has experienced decades of conflict from ethno-nationalist separatism, inter-ethnic territorial disputes and counter-insurgency operations. These ethnic conflicts play out on the urban landscape of Imphal. Control of the city from above is diffused among the civilian gove…
Policymaking ‘under the radar’: A case study of pesticide regulation to prevent intentional poisoning in Sri Lanka
BACKGROUND: Suicide in Sri Lanka is a major public health problem and in 1995 the country had one of the highest rates of suicide worldwide. Since then reductions in overall suicide rates have been largely attributed to efforts to regulate a range of pesticides. The evolution, context, events and implementation of the key policy decisions around regulation are examined. METHODS: This study was undertaken as part of a broader analysis of policy in…
Is India Racist?’: Murder, Migration and Mary Kom
After the 2012 Olympics, Bronze Medal-winning boxer Mary Kom achieved national celebrity status in India. As a member of the Kom tribe, a Tibeto-Burman community from the Northeast region, she has come to represent a region long considered, and self-identifying, as outside the boundaries of the Indian nation. The same week that Mary Kom returned from London, thirty thousand Northeast migrants fled Indian cities fearing racially-motivated attacks.…
Adjacent identities in Northeast India
In this article I explore the emergence, or re-emergence, of what I refer to as adjacent identities in response to changing circumstances for many Northeast communities in the last decade. In this paper I argue that it is important to consider seriously the ways in which communities in the region respond to the material and ideational changes to their lives in the present conjuncture by exploring adjacent ways of constructing identity in the face…
English-Language Documents and Old Trucks: Creating Infrastructure in Nagaland's Coal Mining Villages
In Nagaland, state attempts to control coal mining are framed as efforts to stop practices labelled ‘unscientific’ by the government. In this article we explore the ways in which communities create their own mining infrastructure built on networks of relations—materialised in English-language documents—and everyday technology—demonstrated in the prevalence of old trucks and improvised machinery. These objects enable livelihoods and supplementary …
Political science (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (28 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (23 works) · Geography (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Archaeology (11 works)