Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof James D Sidaway, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

India’s Northeastern frontier has long been an epicenter of ethnicity-based identity politics and exclusions. In post-independence India, the region experienced many territorial assertions being made on ethnic grounds. However, with the more recent rise of religio-nationalist politics in India, exclusions based on class and caste have increasingly become entangled with the already-existing divides. This has led to further displacement, enclavization, and ghettoization of the minority (deemed ‘non-native’) communities in urban areas. Frontier cities are critical sites for understanding this new identity politics in the Northeast, where concentrated entanglements of exclusions and borderings become manifest. In this paper, we discuss the entwining of class/caste/religion divides within ‘non-native’ communities and how the spaces they inhabit have become sites of prosecution from the ‘native’ communities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Prerona Das is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Singapore Management University. She graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2022 with a PhD in Geography. Prerona was born and brought up in the city of Guwahati in Northeast India. Her doctoral research was about reproduction of India’s partition geopolitics in urban spaces that become manifest through everyday interactions with fragmented urban infrastructure, focusing on a micro-urban site in Guwahati. As a postdoctoral fellow she is currently conducting research on the politics of smart city knowledge transfer in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Her other research interests include politics of infrastructure, gentrification, and frontier urbanism.

Gaurav Mittal is Mobility Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Management & Innovation, University of Toronto Mississauga. He holds a PhD in geography from National University of Singapore and a master’s degree in urban policy and governance from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. His research focuses on political geographies of transport interventions in small and medium size cities in India. Gaurav’s academic interests include urban governance, infrastructures, political economy, and southern theory.

Jasnea Sarma is a senior researcher and lecturer in Political Geography at the University of Zurich. Her research is on the connective geographies and borderworlds between India, China, Myanmar (Burma), and Bangladesh where she has conducted multi sited and multi lingual fieldwork since 2014. Her research work, especially on themes of infrastructures, surveillance, militarisation, resource extraction and border-urban frontiers, has been published in major international journals including International Journal for Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), Eurasian Geography and Economics, Territory Politics and Governance, Political Geography, Journal of Borderland Studies etc. Her ongoing book project draws from her doctoral research, a multi-year ethnography of Myanmar’s borderlands and resource frontiers with India and China, which won the Wang Gungwu Award for an outstanding PhD dissertation in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore in 2021. Jasnea currently serves as the review and forum editor of Geopolitics and is an editor with the Burma Studies blog, The Tea Circle.

Diganta Das is Associate Professor of Geography at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He received his PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests focus on Singapore as an urban model and its travel in Asia and beyond, Smart Urbanism in Asia, high-tech space making and issues of human agency in urban South Asia, changing dynamics of (urban) waterscapes, and issues of liveability and sustainable urban development. He is currently involved in several research projects that examine geographies of smart urbanism, issues of waterscapes in urbanizing Asia, sustainability challenges in Asia and sand mining. He is also the Co-Chair of the Sustainability Learning Lab (SLL) at NIE-NTU.

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Newcastle (in Australia) and prior to that at University of New South Wales from 2007-2018. McDuie-Ra’s research interests include Asian borderlands (northeast India), surveillance, migration/mobilities, race and racial politics in Asia, and urban street cultures. McDuie-Ra is the author of eight books, including two on skateboarding: Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below (Springer/Palgrave 2021). Books on borderlands/Northeast India include: Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), Debating Race in Contemporary India (Springer/Palgrave 2015), Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), and Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-authored with Dolly Kikon). McDuie-Ra’s research has appeared in scores of academic journals and edited collections, including Urban Studies, Development & Change, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, Men & Masculinities and Emotion Space & Society. His articles on skateboarding have been published in Memory Studies, Mobilities, Surveillance & Society, Space & Culture, and Geographical Research among others.

Sebastian Schwecke received his PhD from Leipzig University in 2010 in political science with a study on the political economy of Hindu nationalist and Islamist movements. Subsequently, he shifted to the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at Göttingen where he developed a research agenda combining social and economic history with economic anthropology. Before joining Max Weber Foundation, he was an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His main interests relate to the study of markets and exchange, credit/debt and speculation, extra-legality, uncertainty, trust, hope, calculability, and reputation as well as labour and skill.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid event has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the talk.