Our former Undergraduate Program Director & Chair for the Department of Anthropology and current Full-time Faculty member, Dr. Shubhra Gururani has recently co-edited a special issue for the Urbanisation journal anchored by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). You can read the journal and her article on open access until September 30th, 2021.
This Special Issue on Agrarian Urbanisation: Emerging Entanglements of Land, Labour, and Capital comes together in the context of two urgent trends in India: the farmers’ protests that have been ongoing since 2019 and the rise of Hindutva majoritarianism. We argue that these events are not only about an agrarian crisis, but they are equally an urban crisis. We forge a conversation between agrarian and urban studies and focus on the analytics of caste, class, labour, and land. The papers and two commentaries draw on varied regional contexts in India and offer grounded insights on India’s conjoined agrarian-urban transformation. The special issue shows how the changing aspirations, mobility, and desire for urbanity produce a politically volatile landscape of contestations, accommodation, and majoritarian assertion.