PoLAR 2022 Sriraman Affective Activism and Digital Archiving Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid‐ (original) (raw)

Abstract

This article traces what I term the affective activism of volunteers, civil society organiza-tions, and lorry drivers engaged in relief work to assist stranded migrant workers wantingto travel home during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and national lockdown inIndia. I define affective activism as an archival practice that is driven by relief figures’ af-fects of fear, anger, and aspirations—in this instance, toward their legal and administrativeaccountability to funders. Drawing on my ethnographic work in a relief network and usingindependent interviews I conducted, this article critically compares two modalities of dig-ital archiving conducted by relief figures: collecting migrant workers’ Aadhaar—uniquebiometric number identifiers issued to Indians—and digitally archiving their relief effortsthrough videos, voice-notes, and WhatsApp Messenger screenshots. I argue that relief fig-ures expressed their anxieties in the form of talismanic beliefs that records of Aadhaarand their material infrastructure would keep safe the migrant workers they were trying tohelp. Alternately, and sometimes, concomitantly, they performatively deployed Whatsappartifacts to support their accountability in the face of bureaucratic and political specters.Both forms highlight the desire of relief figures to exceed paper forms and state practices intheir archival impulses. [affective activism, India relief work, Covid-19 lockdown, migrantworkers, digital archiving, and visual politics]

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