Everyday State-Society Relationships and Social Movements in Adivasi Communities, Western Madhya Pradesh, India

This project will investigate how adivasi (indigenous) communities in western Madhya Pradesh, India, learn to engage with the repressive and coercive practices of local representatives and institutions of the state through participation in social movement s. Moreover, it will investigate the extent to which such processes, and the changes thus effected in local state-society relationships, enable adivasi communities to contest their adverse incorporation in the regional political economy. The project will pay close attention to how local state-society relationships are shaped by and in turn shape regional, national and transnational processes of economic restructuring and state rescaling. Theoretically, the project draws on and seeks to contribute to a bod y of critical development research which focuses on how power dynamics in development are animated by forms of micro-politics that unfold in particular localities. The project will develop generic and politically enabling insights concerning the relations hip between marginalized groups and state institutions, with a particular focus on how marginalized groups can develop the capacity to make rights-based claims through participation in social movements. The project would proceed via a full year of ethnogr aphic research (participant observation and in-depth interviews) in and on social movements active in adivasi communities in western Madhya Pradesh. The first phase of the fieldwork will revolve around establishing the terms of access to the field through series of introductory meetings with interested organizations in the region. The second phase of the fieldwork will focus on collecting data from two adivasi organizations over two periods of five months. The project will involve a stay as Visiting Fello w at the Developing Countries Research Centre at Delhi University, as well as a stay as Visiting Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York.