RESEARCH
My research project is a multi-modal ethnography that uses feminist filmmaking, poetry and activist ethnography, both as methods and praxis, to look at Indigenous resistance and sovereignty on the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands. What drew me to my research is the power of intergenerational and every day resistance that Indigenous people take with and against the nation state. Beyond overt acts of political resistance such as insurgencies and peaceful or violent protests, I look at how the small acts of the every-day have the power to shift the nation and the nation-state.
I draw on three years of research conducted between 2014-2019 in Mizoram, once a “special zone” in the British Empire and now a Northeast Indian state bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh. Through participant observation, feminist oral history, and collaborative ethnographic and ethnofiction filmmaking, I investigate how Mizos create and maintain their nationness and Indigenous and Christian identities through fraught interactions with actors they see as nationally, ethnically, religiously, and morally different.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology