Doctoral Dissertation Research: New Modes of State Governance and Mobile Communities

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The relationship between mobile populations and state interventions is long, complex, and contradictory. Geopolitical tensions have intensified state presence in remote areas such mobile populations face various challenges in resisting and adapting to state formations. This doctoral dissertation project studies how modes of mobility are impacted by state bureaucracy, infrastructure, and regulation. By investigating how people navigate complex state bureaucratic systems that require major shifts to their lives, this dissertation research advances scientific understandings of how communities experience the complexities and opportunities of new infrastructure in both locally specific and broadly similar ways. Findings from this research will be disseminated to better understand state development projects that seem banal but might instead be major and meaningful changes for people. While building roads and requiring different forms of licensure seem to encourage safer and more accessible mobility, how are they actually experienced on the ground? This project also brings historically underrepresented and geographically significant groups into the discovery process of scientific knowledge. This doctoral research project investigates local and individual experiences of state formation through an ethnographic study of the role of legalized and certified mobility in modes of new state bureaucratic governance. This research examines (1) how mobility is remade under new forms of state road regulations, driving license requirements, and discipline around mobility and (2) how individuals experience, navigate, adapt, and respond to these new forms of state intervention in their day-to-day lives. Research methods for this project consist of ethnographic participant observation, semi-structured interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, oral histories of mobile communities, and reviews of official documents. Data analysis will focus on both contextualizing nomads’ experiences of state interventions and situating this study in relation to similar cases elsewhere in the world. In doing so, this research contributes to scientific theories of state formation, Indigenous knowledge, modes of bureaucratic infrastructures, and state development projects as modernization.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.