Critical Ethnography of Ethnic Conflict and Peacebuilding in Northeast India
This critical ethnography focuses on everyday experiences of diverse ethnic communities in Northeast India as they witness, experience, perpetuate and/or resist ethnic conflict. investigation of ethnic conflict in Northeast India. Arguing against the hegemony of State-sponsored ethnic identity categories, this work critically engages with the assumptions of Indian nationalism, citizenship and belonging as they apply to different constituencies in Northeast India. By disrupting common representations of communities as either “victims” of violence or “perpetrators” of violence, this research provides important avenues for intervention, particularly community-level/grassroots peacebuilding.
The Everyday Peace Project
This is a pedagogical initiative that combines research and critical pedagogy to engage students in local context-based peacebuilding efforts. The Everyday Peace Project is organized around three elements: collaborative, context-based envisioning of everyday peace; developing and enacting an action agenda for everyday peace; and process evaluations whereby we document methodologies, emerging frameworks, community engagement strategies, challenges, and process outcomes so as to develop a framework that might be relevant to other contexts.
Action Research in Lowell: The Lowell Youth Photovoice Project
This project explored youth perspectives on everyday violence using a participatory action research approach. We worked alongside local youth to document their experiences and their explanations about the multiple forms of violence in their daily lives. They not only names the different forms of structural and cultural violence but also offered sites of possibilities. In doing so, they offered counter narratives that disrupted dominant discourses that characterize their communities as sites of violence and disinvestment. (Collaborators: Lowell Community Health Center’s Teen BLOCK)
Action Research in Lowell: A Community-Based Digital Storytelling Project
One area of my research program uses participatory and action research methodologies to understand, document, and strive to address everyday violence (direct, structural, and symbolic) experienced by youth in Lowell, MA. As importantly, this project is also about exploring and creating opportunities for critical youth assertion and youth resistance. This project uses collaborative digital storytelling to elicit, document, and disseminate local youth perspectives on community. Digital storytelling involves the use of multimedia technologies (e.g., text, graphics, photographs, video, music, audio narration) to create and share first-person accounts on a specific topic. As a formal research and community-building practice, digital storytelling emerged in the mid-90s and has been used as a vehicle for expression of marginalized voices. Our project positions youth as knowledge-generators and social change agents who use digital stories to collaboratively create and disseminate narratives highlighting critical issues impacting their communities. (Collaborators: Dr. Jenna Vinson, Lowell Community Health Center’s Teen BLOCK, YWCA Lowell)
Gendered Violence in Northeast India: Centering Women’s Analysis
This project investigates gendered patterns of violence in Garo Hills, India. My previous research in the region has underscored the overarching discourse of masculinity and heteronormativity characterizing public discourses surrounding ethnic conflict. Rather than generalize about “Garo tribal women” based on stereotypes or assumptions, my research explores how Garo women define their own identities at the intersections of gender, race and socioeconomic class. Through intensive fieldwork conducted during periods of escalated armed conflict, my research illuminated multiple forms of violence—domestic violence, sex trafficking, sexual abuse, direct violence, and economic exploitation—that shape Garo women’s daily lives. While most institutions in the region justify or deny the violence experienced by Garo women, the women’s own narratives create a powerful alternative and have important policy implications. Foregrounding Garo women’s critical analysis, my research seeks to unearth the spectrum of violence experienced by Garo women and the processes through which patriarchal power is reproduced in conflict situations. (Collaborator: Ms. Balmuri K. Marak)