The Violence, Identities and the Nation-State: Re-Thinking Resistance and Citizenship with Feminist and Postcolonial perspectives symposium hosted by the Interculturality for diversity and global learning research group and Diversity, Equity and Education Collective (DeCol) network, brought together scholars working within and beyond post-colonial Global South contexts to re-position understandings of violence, identities and citizenship.
The symposium focussed on strategies of participation, resistance and assertion of identities of historically marginalised and discursively subordinated social groups as well as emerging minoritised groups as they navigate precarious contexts of violence, conflict, epistemic misrecognition, changing geographies of power and oscillatory discourses of citizenship.
Offering nuanced accounts as well as critiques of liberal ‘Western’ framings of agency, presenters in this symposium deployed feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, poststructural and ‘alternative’ theoretical frameworks to challenge dominant narratives of resistance and citizenship.
The day-long event drew attention to the differing conceptions of violence which exist to secure the violence of the state, as purportedly done in the name of modernity, democracy, defence of sovereignty and development. This required re-thinking resistance and citizenship in ways that interrogated common and normative understandings.
The symposium was held online and as part of the ESRC-funded project on Rural Youth Identities in India: Exploring Intersections of Nation, Gender and Technology in Areas of Civil Unrest led by Dr Gunjan Wadhwa, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Education, Brunel University London.
Symposium presenters and topics:
- Nationalism as Anti-Americanism in Pakistani Political cartoons; Saadia Gardezi, Warwick University (Politics and International Studies)
- Nationalism, social cohesion in postcolonial countries of India and Pakistan in a globalised world; Nipunika Sachdeva, formerly at Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India
- State-coercion in the time of Pandemic: Resilience of Kashmiri Women against Coercion and Virus ; K.W. Hassan, Central University of Kashmir
- Violent Narratives of Hindu Nationalist Women: Unpacking the Contradictions; Anshu Saluja, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
- Caste fanaticism and gender stereotypes of Hindutva: Exploring the interplay of hegemonic masculinity, caste and nationalism in India; Aniket Nandan, National Law school of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, India
- Making (ab)sense of women’s agency and belonging in citizenship debates in India: Analyzing the Shaheen Bagh protests as ‘Act of Citizenship’; Papia Sengupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
- Androgynous Black and Indigenous. Non-gendered resistance and citizenships in late colonial Brazil (1775-1808) Agata Błoch, University of Warsaw