SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Steve Matthewman

Sneha Singh
Understanding Identity and Belonging Amongst Indian Diaspora in Aotearoa

This paper is a part of my larger doctoral project titled Understanding (Digital) Citizenship Practices of Women in Indian Diasporic Communities. In this paper, I discuss the issues of identity, belonging and citizenship based on the narratives and experiences of my research participants. My analysis draws on the semi-structured interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and social media data of 25 research participants. Having various national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious affiliations, the processes of identity construction is complex and multi-faceted for the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa. I discuss how my participants (who come from very diverse backgrounds) navigate through their identity and belonging in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and/or other countries of origin. Based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, I classify their belonging into four types- transnational, regional, religious/linguistic and political belonging. By constructing multiple ways of belonging (four, stated above), my research participants challenged the formal citizenship discourses (in terms of legal status of citizenship) by claiming citizenship and belonging to India, New Zealand and other countries of their origin. As such, this paper contributes to the literature on diaspora, migration and citizenship studies.


Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul
Temporalities and staggered legal inclusion: the legal production of “statelessness” in Thailand

In the public campaigns to end statelessness, citizenship and statelessness tend to be positioned as legal opposites—the former as a normative legal status guaranteeing total inclusion and the latter as a legal deviance with abject rightlessness. This static dichotomy fails to capture the nuances of the 21st century regime of statelessness, which often oscillates between inclusion and exclusion and expresses itself in quasi-legal categories. This presentation examines governance and the legal production of contemporary statelessness in northern Thailand, a region with a large semi-legal “alien” population. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and the lens of institutional, biographic and everyday temporalities (Robertson 2019), I highlight the dynamism within the ways the Thai state “sees” (Scott 1998) and manages its “alien” population in the last three decades. I argue that these aspects of temporalities embedded in a complex system of categorisations and identification lead to staggered inclusion and a hierarchy of statelessness among people who otherwise share similar backgrounds. The regime renders each stateless person stateless in their own way, and each generation a specific set of legal limitations and hurdles. Statelessness in contemporary Thailand is therefore best understood not as complete rightlessness but a hierarchy of hope dictated by temporalities.


Ruchika Ranwa and Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert
Genealogies of Dispossession and Marginalisation: Case of Kalbeliyas of Rajasthan, India.

Drawing on Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power” and Maria Lugones’s concept of “coloniality of gender”, this paper analyses the historical genealogies of marginalization experienced by Kalbeliya women dancers of Rajasthan and its ongoing manifestations in structuring power relations, social hierarchies and “unfreedoms” in post-independent India. Despite being recognized as heritage bearers by UNESCO in 2010, Kalbeliya dancers continue to face social stigma. This stigma is historically rooted in dominant colonial discourses of morality and respectability concerning women in the 20th century, reflecting Indian upper caste and class anxieties about moral transgressions. Paralleled with colonial notions of the 'excessive' sexuality of low caste women, dancers, in particular, were constructed as “common” women (Thapar, 1993), who transgressed normative regulations of sexuality, marriage and domesticity. These forms of marginalisation have re-configured in the post-heritage recognition phase for Kalbeliya dancers as they are encountered with new forms of exploitative economic relations and unequal power dynamics, which reflect conditions akin to “modern slavery”. Despite UNESCO’s emphasis on improving local heritage bearers' participation in safeguarding their heritage, the dominance of Indian state institutions in these processes has led to a) dispossession of Kalbeliya dancers of their rights and responsibilities as heritage bearers and b) commercialization and extraction of Kalbeliyas’ heritage through private sector led tourism (Ranwa, 2021) This puts their heritage at the risk of erosion and exacerbates their vulnerability to exploitation. The paper draws on ethnographic field work conducted by the first author between 2018- 2024 in Jodhpur, Jaipur and Jaisalmer, cities in Rajasthan.