Lipika Kamra
Biographic Data
| ID | 84058 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lipika Kamra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lipika |
| FAMILY NAME | Kamra |
| SIGNATURE | KAMRA L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6249-7671 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
State Categories and Their Afterlives: The Politics of "Tribalisation" in Eastern India
This article examines the afterlives of state classificatory categories in everyday engagements between state and society. It examines how a community of cultivators in eastern and central India, the Kudmi-Mahatos, have reshaped their group identity through categories of the state. They have oscillated between not wanting to be labelled as "tribal" by the colonial state to seeking to be recognised as "Scheduled Tribes" by the post-colonial state.…
Digital denizenship: Hindu nationalist architectures of digital closings and unbelonging in India
This paper examines the sociodigital experiences of political and religious minorities in contemporary India to understand matters of voice and power, as well as feelings of belonging, identity and citizenship. It builds out from research conducted in New Delhi between February and June 2019 during and after the Indian national elections and focuses on WhatsApp as an everyday space where Hindu nationalism is (re)produced and articulated through m…
Grassroots authoritarianism: WhatsApp, middle-class boundary-making and pandemic governance in New Delhi’s neighbourhoods
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper documents how ordinary digital technologies, such as WhatsApp, were (re)appropriated for communication and pandemic coordination at a time when face-to-face meetings were impossible. However, there was also an emergent 'dark' side to its use. In the context of India's democratic backsliding, middle-class Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) deployed everyday technologies to (re)configure e…
No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India
WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right…
The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India
Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens' everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the er…
The Pandemic in the Periphery of Delhi: Covid-19 and Boundary (Re)Making in Peri-Urban India
Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency
This article examines the micropolitics of state-directed women’s collectives in India called self-help groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a setting where development becomes a means of counterinsurgency for the state, it looks at how rural women in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal use these collectives to negotiate with the state and make claims on state actors. The article argues that rural women aspire to new individual selves t…
Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making
This introduction to the special issue lays out the importance of studying women’s collectives in South Asia. We argue in this issue that it is particularly important to examine collectives in this moment because transformations in South Asian women’s lives are increasingly described in individual terms in state policy and international development discourses. The emphasis on individual empowerment alone, however, effaces the subtle negotiations …
The expanded state in contemporary India: Counterinsurgency and the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship
This paper explores the ‘expanded state’ in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government’s attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed…
Theorizing NGOs: States, feminisms, and neoliberalism by Bernal, Victoria and Inderpal Grewal
South Asian feminisms
South Asian feminisms offers fresh perspectives on the current state and the future of feminist politics in South Asia and the rest of the non-western world. The 16 essays in the volume engage with
Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women's Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement
Women were active participants in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in India but were made invisible in the mainstream historiography of the movement. However, memoirs and autobiographies of women Naxalites bring out their experiences of participation in the movement. This paper engages with the memoirs of two of them, K. Ajitha and Krishna Bandyopadhyay, and argues that these women demonstrate a non-sovereign agency in self-making thr…
Grassroots authoritarianism: WhatsApp, middle-class boundary-making and pandemic governance in New Delhi’s neighbourhoods
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper documents how ordinary digital technologies, such as WhatsApp, were (re)appropriated for communication and pandemic coordination at a time when face-to-face meetings were impossible. However, there was also an emergent 'dark' side to its use. In the context of India's democratic backsliding, middle-class Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) deployed everyday technologies to (re)configure e…
The expanded state in contemporary India: Counterinsurgency and the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship
This paper explores the ‘expanded state’ in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government’s attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed…
No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India
WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right…
The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India
Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens' everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the er…
Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women's Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement
Women were active participants in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in India but were made invisible in the mainstream historiography of the movement. However, memoirs and autobiographies of women Naxalites bring out their experiences of participation in the movement. This paper engages with the memoirs of two of them, K. Ajitha and Krishna Bandyopadhyay, and argues that these women demonstrate a non-sovereign agency in self-making thr…
Digital denizenship: Hindu nationalist architectures of digital closings and unbelonging in India
This paper examines the sociodigital experiences of political and religious minorities in contemporary India to understand matters of voice and power, as well as feelings of belonging, identity and citizenship. It builds out from research conducted in New Delhi between February and June 2019 during and after the Indian national elections and focuses on WhatsApp as an everyday space where Hindu nationalism is (re)produced and articulated through m…
The Pandemic in the Periphery of Delhi: Covid-19 and Boundary (Re)Making in Peri-Urban India
Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making
This introduction to the special issue lays out the importance of studying women’s collectives in South Asia. We argue in this issue that it is particularly important to examine collectives in this moment because transformations in South Asian women’s lives are increasingly described in individual terms in state policy and international development discourses. The emphasis on individual empowerment alone, however, effaces the subtle negotiations …
South Asian feminisms
South Asian feminisms offers fresh perspectives on the current state and the future of feminist politics in South Asia and the rest of the non-western world. The 16 essays in the volume engage with
Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women's Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement
Women were active participants in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in India but were made invisible in the mainstream historiography of the movement. However, memoirs and autobiographies of women Naxalites bring out their experiences of participation in the movement. This paper engages with the memoirs of two of them, K. Ajitha and Krishna Bandyopadhyay, and argues that these women demonstrate a non-sovereign agency in self-making thr…
Theorizing NGOs: States, feminisms, and neoliberalism by Bernal, Victoria and Inderpal Grewal
The expanded state in contemporary India: Counterinsurgency and the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship
This paper explores the ‘expanded state’ in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government’s attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed…
Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency
This article examines the micropolitics of state-directed women’s collectives in India called self-help groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a setting where development becomes a means of counterinsurgency for the state, it looks at how rural women in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal use these collectives to negotiate with the state and make claims on state actors. The article argues that rural women aspire to new individual selves t…
Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making
This introduction to the special issue lays out the importance of studying women’s collectives in South Asia. We argue in this issue that it is particularly important to examine collectives in this moment because transformations in South Asian women’s lives are increasingly described in individual terms in state policy and international development discourses. The emphasis on individual empowerment alone, however, effaces the subtle negotiations …
The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India
Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens' everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the er…
The Pandemic in the Periphery of Delhi: Covid-19 and Boundary (Re)Making in Peri-Urban India
No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India
WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right…
Grassroots authoritarianism: WhatsApp, middle-class boundary-making and pandemic governance in New Delhi’s neighbourhoods
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper documents how ordinary digital technologies, such as WhatsApp, were (re)appropriated for communication and pandemic coordination at a time when face-to-face meetings were impossible. However, there was also an emergent 'dark' side to its use. In the context of India's democratic backsliding, middle-class Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) deployed everyday technologies to (re)configure e…
Digital denizenship: Hindu nationalist architectures of digital closings and unbelonging in India
This paper examines the sociodigital experiences of political and religious minorities in contemporary India to understand matters of voice and power, as well as feelings of belonging, identity and citizenship. It builds out from research conducted in New Delhi between February and June 2019 during and after the Indian national elections and focuses on WhatsApp as an everyday space where Hindu nationalism is (re)produced and articulated through m…
State Categories and Their Afterlives: The Politics of "Tribalisation" in Eastern India
This article examines the afterlives of state classificatory categories in everyday engagements between state and society. It examines how a community of cultivators in eastern and central India, the Kudmi-Mahatos, have reshaped their group identity through categories of the state. They have oscillated between not wanting to be labelled as "tribal" by the colonial state to seeking to be recognised as "Scheduled Tribes" by the post-colonial state.…
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (6 works) · State (computer science (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works)