<< This workshop is co-organised by ICAS:MP and the Centre de Sciences Humaines. Taking place at the Institute of Economic Growth, it will give the opportunity to participants to visit the exhibition Memories of Change and reflect on the synergies between the archival material displayed and current academic scholarship on youth politics in the Global South.

Concept note

Across much of the Global South today, in social movements of the Left and Right, uprisings for democratic freedom, protests around caste and sexual harassment, agitations for employment and education, the participation and leadership of youth stands out. This surge of youth politics, while reminiscent in some ways of the student movements of the late 1960s, speaks to a quite different moment defined by globalized capitalism, authoritarian populism, and mediatized politics. Despite the recent expansion of youth studies, focused attention on how youth make and are, in turn, made by the politics of our times, remains lacking.

This workshop on Youth Politics in the Global South, to be held on November 29-30, 2019 at Delhi, India, aims to bring an ethnographic lens to bear on the cultural politics of young people as they participate in collective action and as they exercise more individualized forms of agency. It examines new subjectivities, grammars of politics, and arenas of contestation.

It explores how youth of the Global South have begun to variously insert themselves into the political sphere, and the extent to which their modes of participation signify a potential for political transformation. Recognizing that forms of collective action that involve youth are not all progressive, it also identifies the places and conditions under which youth rally around exclusionary or nativist causes on the one hand, and more inclusive and expansive causes on the other.

The workshop focuses on the following themes

1. The making of political subjectivities among radical Left, Right, Minority and other youth activists (e.g. Arab Spring, Me Too).

2. Arenas of contestation: the role of social media, the transformation of public space, altered grammar and body language, as youth engage in collective action and projects of self-making.

3. “Extrapolitics” or the fashioning of youth identities in relation to gender, modernity, caste in spheres other than formal politics – in the workplace, at home, through patterns of consumption, sociality and spirituality.

Date: 29 to 30 November 2019

Workshop organisers: Amita Baviskar(ICAS:MP) and Raka Ray (UC Berkeley) in collaboration withCentre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi (CSH) and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) South Asia

The workshop programme

Friday, November 29, 2019

9:30 Tea and Introduction
10:00-11:30 Session 1

Raka Ray, University of California at Berkeley
Gendered Aspiration, Precarity and the Search for Upward Mobility in India
Nandini Gooptu, University of Oxford
Youth Political Subjectivity, Democratic Sensibility and the Culture of Customer Care in Service Work
Discussant: Satendra Kumar, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla

Coffee
11:45-1:15 Session 2

Divine Fuh, University of Cape Town
Suffering and Smiling in Cameroon: Precarity, Violence and the Imagination of New Youth Subjectivities
Jordanna Matlon, American University, Washington DC
Bottling Greatness: Guinness and the African Man
Discussant: Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru

1:15-2:15 Lunch
2:15-3:45 Session 3

Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, University of Melbourne
“As If It Was Okay and Then It Was”: The Politics of Reaching Ahead in Uttarakhand
Amita Baviskar, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi
Latecomers: Young Educated Adivasis and Political Practice in Western Madhya Pradesh
Discussant: Sangeeta Dasgupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Coffee
4:00-5.30 Session 4

Jean-Thomas Martelli, Centre de Sciences Humaines, Delhi
The Politics of our Selves: Left Self-fashioning and the Production of Representative Claims in Everyday Indian Campus Politics
Ritty Lukose, New York University
Youth and “Political Society”
Discussants: Niraja Gopal Jayal, Jawaharlal Nehru University

7:30 Dinner

Saturday, November 30, 2019
9:30-11:00 Session 5

Julie Archambault, Concordia University, Montreal
Mobile Pacifiers? Youth Cynicism and Online Political Cultures in Mozambique
Yatun Sastramidjaja, University of Amsterdam
Radical Anti-Politics and Intersectionality in the Multi-Mediated Ecology of Youth Activism in Contemporary Indonesia
Discussant (TBC): Satish Deshpande, University of Delhi

Coffee
11:15-1:00 Session 6

Summing up: Nandini Sundar, ICAS:MP Fellow/University of Delhi
Book planning

1:00-2:00 Lunch

Original post (on ICAS:MP website): https://micasmp.hypotheses.org/3133