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Papers by Kavita Ramakrishnan

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

This special issue bridges human geography, anthropology and political ecology to understand infr... more This special issue bridges human geography, anthropology and political ecology to understand infrastructure in between conditions of decay and repair, and how embodied experiences of infrastructure intersect with processes of socio-spatial transformation. Our focus on decay and repair builds on literature that understands infrastructure as material processes articulated through social and affective dimensions, with implications for infrastructural access and broader political claims (

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2020

This paper focuses on self-organized, grassroots volunteers who have emerged as key actors in the... more This paper focuses on self-organized, grassroots volunteers who have emerged as key actors in the humanitarian response to Europe’s contemporary “refugee crisis.” Based on ethnographic research on the Greek island of Chios and in Paris and taking established critiques of humanitarianism as our point of departure, we explore how volunteers providing humanitarian care navigate the ethical and political dilemmas traditionally encountered by aid workers. More specifically, we ask: what kinds of social relations do volunteers enact through their practices and in their everyday encounters with refugees in and beyond refugee camps? How do the specific qualities of these encounters affect the possibilities of enacting alternative modes of humanitarian practice? Focusing firstly on volunteer-refugee interactions during camp distributions – the paradigmatic mode of humanitarian work – we explore how volunteers simultaneously mimic disciplinary humanitarian practices and engage in processes of...

British Academy, 2020

This piece draws on recent research focused on the humanitarian politics of the refugee ‘crisis’ ... more This piece draws on recent research focused on the humanitarian politics of the refugee ‘crisis’ and its relationship with European futures. Our aim is three-fold: first, we contextualise the rise of right-wing populism and the politicisation of refugees in Europe. Second, we reflect on how state austerities place precarious refugees alongside marginalised European citizens, with under-explored consequences and tensions. Third, we point to the hopeful practices around the ‘experimental humanitarianism’ that we encountered across the four capital cities in which we conducted research. The paper highlights the limitations of state-centric provisioning and the potential pathways that existing experiments of solidarity can build on the margins of European cities. These are often unseen or off-grid nodes of hope set against a backdrop of generalised European political malaise.

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social proces... more Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure's temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questions of the dynamics of infrastructure over different phases of its lifespan, and their generative effects. In this paper, we advance these debates through a focus on the processes of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize such phases of infrastructural life, by exploring how specific infrastructures are materially shaped by, and shape, social, political, and socio-ecological arrangements. Our intervention has two related aims: first, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure's dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; second, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socioecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure's "temporal fragility" elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources.

CITY, 2017

For ethnographers repeatedly engaged with the same community on the ‘margins’, questions of acces... more For ethnographers repeatedly engaged with the same community on the ‘margins’, questions of access, positionality and representation become compounded by temporal dynamism. Participant and researcher subjectivities change over time, thus destabilizing identities and calling into question where and how to frame conversations. I reflect on bridging the gap between theoretical perspectives on the ‘margins’ and how inhabitants of a Delhi resettlement colony variously describe notions of liminality—from the metaphoric, to the geographic and to the social—over a prolonged ethnographic encounter. By bringing the temporal ‘journey’ of the researcher and interlocutor to the fore, I seek to open up a conversation on situated knowledges. More specifically, I ask how (and if) urban ethnographers can adequately capture shifting aspirations and feelings of in-betweenness, while grappling with one’s own responsibility to politically engaged research. Finally, I discuss the political relevance of evolving attitudes towards life on the margins, with implications for knowledge production and representation

Review of African Political Economy, 2017

Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs o... more Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the grassroots. A case study from Mathare, Nairobi, seeks explanations for the lack of urgency in addressing EJE and also the limited effectiveness of responses to them that are rooted in the political economy of interests of civil society actors, which tends to perpetuate these ‘excluded spaces’ of the slum. The authors do so, however, by exploring one particular struggle to show how frustration with civil society is being used by social justice activists to articulate ideas of ‘everyday’ violence to mobilise for change that disrupts the apparent normalisation of EJE.

To cite this article: Kavita Ramakrishnan (2014) Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins: negotia... more To cite this article: Kavita Ramakrishnan (2014) Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins: negotiating difference and belonging in a Delhi resettlement colony, Contemporary South Asia, 22:1, 67-81,

In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a De... more In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people " make sense " of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their " place " in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships—with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself—and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as " guides " to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.

Book Chapters by Kavita Ramakrishnan

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple politica... more Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.

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Exploring Urban Change in South Asia, 2016

Citizen Humanitarianism at European Borders , 2021