Mid-Term Review Seminar
Today when urban centres across the world are ruled more and more by a ‘world-class’ aesthetic order (Ghertner 2015), street hawkers continue to be perceived as an eyesore, a nuisance, and a blotch on what could be an aspirational image of an aspiring city. The supposed unruliness of hawkers instantly evokes a sense of informality — popularly (mis)understood as a state of non-regulation, illegality, and chaos. The appropriation of public space by hawkers into places of labour and service are often seen as an obstacle to modernity and the inability of a corrupt state to regulate its spaces and labouring bodies.
As street hawking continues to remain one of the most ubiquitous forms of informal urbanism, the speaker asks: How do street hawkers make claims upon the markets and the city? Can the study of hawkers provide new analytical insights about processes of city-making at the margins of the state? Drawing on archival research and a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Siliguri, India, the speaker argues that street hawkers in Siliguri make socio-spatial and political claims on markets and the city by way of unionising, organising themselves under patronage, and/or through generational claims that enable them to negotiate with a relatively absent state and its apparatuses while transforming themselves into governable groups.
Speaker
Ranu Kunwar is a PhD candidate in anthropology in the School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University. Her research seeks to understand informal urbanism in Siliguri by attending to everyday socio-spatial practices that enable street hawkers to forge social, spatial, and political claims on the markets and the city. Ranu also holds an MPhil degree in English from the University of Delhi where she studied Tibetan life-narratives in the diaspora. Her research interests include informal labour, urban spatial productions, and Nepali identity politics in India.
Zoom Details
Link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/3450725439?pwd=N0dua1k4UGwySXd0OU4xRjRCNjN4dz09
Meeting ID: 345 072 5439
Password: 991 667
For any queries contact: Ranu.Kunwar@anu.edu.au