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CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Municipal Councillors, or Parshads, are the ‘familiar face of the state’ in Dehradun, India: the first port of call for citizens seeking to access resources and claim entitlements from the state. The way Parshads respond to the requests of their constituents is a major constituent in the uneven and arbitrary nature of government welfare and services. This article builds upon McFarlane and Desai’s ‘sites of entitlement’ approach by drawing attention to the role affect and emotion play in shaping the interactions between municipal councillors and ‘voters’. I examine the ways citizens consciously or unconsciously engender emotions and affective responses, and the effect these have in mobilising municipal councillors. Attention to the at times involuntary nature of these responses suggests a need to go beyond the rational-calculative motivations of municipal councillors, to consider the way they are compelled to meet the needs and desires of some citizens, but not others. The ability to affect, and the ways that one is affected, are tied to social identities and self-making projects of both Parshad and ‘voter’, resulting in uneven (mal)distribution of state resources. The negotiations of expectations and their manifestation into concrete entitlements contribute to the (re)making of the state, and the production anew of relationships between states and citizens. A focus on women Parshads hints at the gendered nature of these affective mobilizations, and the need to rethink conventional understandings of local governance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tanya Jakimow is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. She is also a Visiting Researcher (sabbatical) at ARI between April and July 2017. Tanya was awarded her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2011. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) she examined changes to agrarian livelihoods in the context of climate variability in Telangana (India) and Central Lombok (Indonesia). Tanya’s current research funded by the Australian Research Council examines urban development in two cities: Medan, Indonesia, and Dehradun, India. There are three main foci: a) the self-fashioning projects of local ‘developers’; b) emergent social hierarchies and resistance to them, and; c) the ways affect and emotion shape the development arena.

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