Social Location and Political Assertion: An Ethnography of Everyday Student Activism in Delhi
Author: Soumodip Sinha, soumodipsinha@gmail.com
Department: Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics
University: University of Delhi, India
Supervisor: Satish Deshpande
Year of completion: In progress
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Student Politics
, University
, Protest
, Pierre Bourdieu
Areas of Research:
Youth
, Political Sociology
, Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change
Abstract
A set of global as well as regional trends or events that have unfolded in the recent years have contributed to a renewed interest on student politics or activism. It has been argued that youth or students in particular are (re)defining the sociopolitical milieu, globally as well as in India through their agency. Hence, my doctoral study attempts to explore, unravel and analyze multifaceted passions as well as multiple perspectives students in India have attached and continually align with politics. It is a sociology/anthropology of student politics among students - considering its central role to politics in recent times, not only to dissect how and why it is a vocation, but more significantly to examine it as an avocation or passion. In doing so, my research study particularly seeks to ask which section(s) of students are exercising its political agency (identity/social locations); where is it doing so (field) and why is it doing so (interests). In inquiring about the multiple fields and interests/goals and together by analyzing the inter-linkages between political participation and social capital, this work further attempts to examine how multiple identities and dominant ideologies can contribute to the reproduction of class or caste hegemony and thereby social inequalities. On the contrary, it also attempts to examine and demonstrate whether student politics can contribute to social change.
This research has been designed in relation to the following questions:
• What is the correlation between political agency and the nature of the ‘fields’? For instance, why would someone exercise her/his political agency in a particular field and not another? On the contrary, are there overlaps between fields? If so, what is the rationale for the same?
• Secondly, is one’s political agency (habitus) coterminous to capital (social location/position) and the field?
• Third, and most significantly, why do students engage with politics? To elaborate, it locates the rationale/interests behind students’ exercising political agency and the values or the goals it seeks to achieve by such engagements.
Theoretically, this study is guided by Bourdieusian categories such as the interactions between social class and forms of capital. In attempting to understand how these intersect with each other in the field (university spaces) as well as how capital is magnified via numerous strategies, the concentrated focal point of student politics in a public university in India is examined. Empirically, this research study is primarily an ethnography - one that explores the political aspirations of university students in Delhi in order to explain how class and capital interact with each other via mediation of political agency and in doing so, how these enable towards (re-) defining the sociopolitical milieu in India. Especially in recent times, constant upheavals have been witnessed in the Indian scenario, wherein students (especially in Public Universities) have mediated their political agency, particularly to assert as well as strive for democratic rights as well as modes of expression. Herein, this research study centrally argues that the agency of the students becomes central in such mediation(s) and it is mapped thereon in the dissertation.
