posted on 2024-09-05, 21:33authored byJaideep Gupte, Syeda Jenifa Zahan
The public health containment measures in response to COVID-19 have precipitated
a significant epistemic and ontological shift in ‘bottom-up’ and ‘action-oriented’ approaches in
development studies research. ‘Lockdown’ necessitates physical and social distancing between
research subject and researcher, raising legitimate concerns around the extent to which
‘distanced’ action-research can be inclusive and address citizens’ lack of agency. Top-down
regimes to control urban spaces through lockdown in India have not stemmed the experience
of violence in public spaces: some have dramatically intensified, while others have changed in
unexpected ways. Drawing on our experiences of researching the silent histories of violence
and memorialisation of past violence in urban India over the past three decades, we argue that
the experience of subaltern groups during the pandemic is not an aberration from their
sustained experiences of everyday violence predating the pandemic. Exceptionalising the
experiences of violence during the pandemic silences past histories and disenfranchises long
struggles for rights in the city. At the same time, we argue that research practices employed to
interpret the experience of urban violence during lockdown in India need to engage the changing nature of infrastructural regimes, as they seek to control urban spaces, and as subaltern
groups continue to mobilise and advocate, in new ways.
Funding
Default funder
History
Publisher
The British Academy
Citation
Jaideep Gupte and Syeda Jenifa Zahan (2021), ‘Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19’, Journal of the British Academy, 9(s3), 139–155, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009s3.139, Posted 22 June 2021