| Abstract |
India's just-amended citizenship laws, the groundswell of ongoing protests against these amendments and their continued brutal repression by the state signal rapid political change and the making of a humanitarian emergency that warrants urgent attention. This project aims to ethnographically research the emergent reimaginations of citizenship in India through imminent official identification of citizens and ongoing protests against such mechanisms, By ethnographically researching the mechanisms through which people will be enumerated as citizens or excluded from the NRC, the project is an urgent response to the gap in our knowledge of official imaginations of citizenship that can only be accomplished within the next 12 months. By ethnographically researching the protests against India's amended citizenship laws as they unfold and before they are browbeaten into submission, the project is an urgent response to the limits in our understanding of oppositional imaginations of citizenship that will only be possible to achieve over the next few months. This research project provides the basis for longer-term research on the future of citizenship as democracies 'backslide', 'recede' and 'die' not only in India but elsewhere in the world. |
