Understanding and Resisting Colonial/Structural Violence Against Miya Communities
I currently work with grassroots organizers from Miya communities in Northeast India (South Asia) to resist colonial, heteropatriarchal, and structural violence. Miya communities have been subjected to complex and shifting legacies of persecution - from the British colonial period to the most recent being mass disenfranchisement, detention, and statelessness. Our collaborative research interrogates everyday violence against Miya communities wrought by ongoing citizenship regimes that operate as state-sanctioned violence. Informed by transnational and indigenous feminist theorizations of citizenship, I center Miya people’s struggles to ask: What are the psychosocial impacts of mass disenfranchisement? How do people disenfranchised by citizenship regimes experience and frame their lived experiences, struggles, histories, and concerns? How do they frame their claims of belonging – to land, communities, states, and/or nations? How are these claims leveraged toward resistance? This research troubles majoritarian stories and dominant knowledges that dehumanize Miya people and justify/legitimize their persecution. We have created the Miya Community Research Collective to build an alternative archive or repository of knowledge that not only confronts historical and ongoing oppression, but also upholds Miya people’s desire – honoring rage, grief, pain, creativity, love, and communality.
(Community partners: Abdul Kalam Azad, Shalim M. Hussain, Kazi Sharowar Hussain, & Rehna Sultana)
Gender Justice in the Global South: Rural Miya Women Resisting Heteropatriarchal and State Violence
I work with Amrapari (We Can), a Miya women artisan’s collective that promotes gender justice via sustainable livelihoods amongst women in rural communities. Amrapari is composed of self-help groups of women who have revived an ancestral legacy of quilt-making passed down by mothers and grandmothers. Collaboratively, we explore how women artisans and organizers in Amrapari collectively challenge multiple, interconnected manifestations of structural violence in their homes, families, communities, and the state. Central to this project is creating spaces for women’s stories, attending to their lived experiences and critical analyses as important forms of knowledge, which promotes epistemic justice. This work is shaped by my previous research that underscored how attending to women’s stories reveals the fundamental heterogeneity of women’s oppression at the margins of the nation state, spaces where state violence, heteropatriarchy, and coloniality make their experiences irreducible to discrete categories (e.g., livelihood, health, domestic violence). Our work traces how Amrapari is emerging as an innovative counter-space for disrupting routine configurations of gendered violence through self-determination and radical community care. This work resists damage-centered narratives of Third World/Global South women and elevates stories that are complex, textured, and irreducible.
(Community partner: Manjuwara Mullah, founder of Amrapari)
Indigenous Futurities and Environmental Justice
I have embarked on a new project that employs storytelling to center Indigenous knowledges as catalysts for environmental justice. This focus comes from an awareness of the interconnectedness of environmental justice with racial justice, gender justice, and decoloniality. This interest was sparked by my public and community work with Adivasi (Indigenous) grassroots climate justice activists from Central India. These interactions have deepened my appreciation for their rich environmental knowledge, developed over centuries and offering crucial insights for environmental stewardship and sustainable living. Given that Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change, their ancestral and experiential knowledges are particularly relevant to understand the broader effects of climate change on livelihood, health, and resilience. Currently, I am immersed in an oral history project documenting the wisdom of Adivasi (Indigenous) climate justice advocates in Central India. This project delves into two crucial areas: 1) Understanding how environmentalism intersects with colonialism, neoliberal policies, gender, and Indigenous self-determination; and 2) Examining how these insights can inform and strengthen psychological interventions to build resilience in communities facing the brunt of climate change. Ultimately, this work aspires to cultivate a holistic and ethical understanding of environmental justice; one that embraces Indigenous knowledges and self-determination as cornerstones for building a sustainable future.
(Community partner: Dayamani Barla)
The Epistemic Justice Project
To take decoloniality seriously, scholar activists must also advocate for epistemic justice within the academy. My research reclaims the Global South—not as site of intervention or adaptation/application of Global North theories—but as a legitimate onto-epistemic standpoint in and of itself. Drawing upon feminist onto-epistemologies, I trouble various psychological constructs, analytical categories, classifications, and discursive practices to disrupt epistemic violence that sustain coloniality and racial capitalism. My work in this area encompasses theoretical contributions , innovations in curriculum and teaching, and advancements in community-based research and practice. Within this project, I also promote and innovate critical qualitative methods as tools for combating marginalization and exclusion; notably through methods such as participatory action research, critical ethnography, counterstorytelling, insurgent poetry, and autoethnography – demonstrating the potential for decolonial and transformative interventions at various levels. This work not only disrupts the normativity of Euro-American knowledges, but also seeks to generate possibilities for radical inclusion and building communities of resistance. This project seeks to advance our understanding of how epistemologies, theories, and research practices from different geopolitical locations and sociohistorical contexts of direct struggle can mutually inform each other.
(Collaborators: Deanne Bell, Devin Atallah, Jesica Fernández, Hugo Canham, Shahnaaz Suffla)