This panel invites papers that engage in ethnographic understandings of alternative spaces which foreground narratives and choices of different individuals and communities from different states of Northeast India, as they leave behind their home and migrate to both within and outside the region for their own subjective reasons. We intend to bring papers together in conversation with one another, that recognize the unequal and intersecting positionalities emerging from theoretical and empirical collaborations.
We then seek to engage with papers which try to understand how collective and associational spaces representing indigenous, tribal, linguistic, religious, ethnic and gendered minorities among others bring individuals and families together in a new place. We also try to understand how these spaces offer alternative ways of building relationships, networks and linkages thereby foregrounding gendered positionalities and intergenerational experiences of belongingness. These identities and subjectivities then become a way of understanding how choice is expressed when ‘migrant’ individuals choose to associate/dissociate from collective socio-economic, cultural, religious and political spaces, and position themselves.
The panel also hopes to discuss the distinct ways of articulating difference and belongingness within food enclaves, and representational spaces in different cosmopolitan urban settings and not imagine them as essentialized processes constitutive of the ‘migrant’ experience in India. Hence we seek to engage with papers that provide well-grounded descriptive and analytical frameworks which centre hierarchies and inequalities that emerge in these meaning making endeavours.
Through our different subjective locations and positionalities our panel in essence grounds ‘migrant’ experiences, identities, and subjectivities in the choices that ‘migrant’ individuals make in their everyday life. We invite papers (but not limited to) engaging in multidisciplinary inquiries emerging from diverse occupational and entrepreneurial experiences, collective and associational spaces, cultures of gastronomy, multifarious expressions of gender and sexuality.
