Mobile Livelihoods and Gendered Citizenship: the Counter-Geographies of Indigenous People in India, China and Laos.

Indigenous people have been increasingly portrayed as marginalized victims with no rights. However, there has been little emphasis on their lived realities, namely how they strategize to survive on a day to day basis. Mobility is becoming a major coping s trategy, and the implications of mobile livelihoods are different for women and men. Such mobility may be seen as direct impacts of increasing geographical connectivity as well as increasing external influence, often manifested through neo-liberalist poli cies as enacted by majority population groups. Principal researchers from four partner institutions in India, China, Thailand and Norway have come together to study the gendered dimensions of such increasing connectivities and mobility among indigenous women and men. Such a project allows us to understand the dynamic changes that they are facing with rapid infrastructure improvement and commercialization/industrialization in their places of livelihoods. Hence, how state policies and cross-border/cross- regional connectivities shape and redefine mobile livelihoods patterns, the rights and citizenship, identities and gender relations ofindigenous women and men, constitute the focus of the study. Most research on indigenous people has been ethnographic case studies. This study seeks to compare indigenous people in three countries - India, China and Laos - which are rapidly being exposed to structural adjustments, neo-liberalist policies and reform. Both qualitative (participatory workshops, ethnographic fieldwork) and quantitative methods (surveys) will be used in this study. The outcome of this study will be articles in internationally refereed journals, a book: "Gendered Livelihoods and Mobilities" (preliminary title), master theses , and curriculum d evelopment in the respective institutions.