62 – Deepening Movement Solidarities Beyond Their Moment of Emergence in South Asia
Abolitionist feminisms teach us to not depend on the logics or the institutional structures of the carceral state to keep us safe; and instead to build networks of care, solidarity, accountability to protect ourselves and one another. In this panel, we reflect on building these networks in the midst of increasing nationalist, transnationalist, and imperialist violence in South Asia. These racialized and gendered violences take legal and extra-legal forms – from extrajudicial abductions and lynchings to legalized deportation, citizenship statutes, sedition charges and loss of employment, inflicting psychic, economic, epistemic, and relational harm. In this panel, we draw on our experiences as both feminist academics and activists researching authoritarian violence and locate moments of emergence within protests and social movements in South Asia that are either fleeting in nature or more enduring. We invite case studies of recent protests and social movements from Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We invite panelists to ask how these movements might reimagine what is possible by theorizing people’s capacity to exercise their creativity and create new kinds of egalitarian politics, precisely at the moment when increasingly authoritarian and fascist regimes seek to shut them down. Then, shifting our gaze from the movements that we study to our own movements inside and outside the field, we reflect on our own practice as academics from the Global North to the South, and what it might mean to nurture our solidarities beyond their moment of emergence.
