Citizenship Futures: 'the Politics Of Hope' In India And Europe

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Hope for the future, we contend, remain central to the political imaginations of socially excluded people. However, the relationship between hope, social exclusion and citizenship are poorly understood. Much of the existing literature primes scholars to infer that social exclusion spawns hopelessness, fear and mistrust. Policy analysts point to the paucity of 'aspirations' among the socially excluded as a key factor for the perpetuation of poverty and inequality. Against this literature, by underscoring 'the politics of hope' (Appadurai, 2013: 129) harboured by socially excluded people, the proposed research will provide insights into the ways in which they imagine their 'citizenship futures'. It seeks to analytically and empirically investigate the 'politics of hope' among socially excluded people. The project will achieve this by ethnographically documenting the political subjectivities of socially excluded people in the United Kingdom, France and the Indian State of Maharashtra and thereby uncovering the ensemble of interpretations, emotions and practices that constitute 'the politics of hope'. By examining the 'politics of hope', the project will deepen our understanding of the ways in which socially excluded people imagine their 'citizenship futures. It will do so by straddling disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the arts and humanities.Project objective: The central aim of this research project is to develop theoretically and empirically the concept of 'citizenship futures'.RQ1: What 'hopes' to socially excluded people harbour for their futures, in the context of the social relations of power to which they are subjected? RQ1 will be addressed through comparative ethnographies in London, Paris and Mumbai. RQ2: What institutional factors shape people's 'hopes' for the future? RQ2 will be addressed through a historical-institutionalist analysis of political narratives in the UK, France and the Indian State of Maharashtra. For the purpose of analysis, we propose to adapt Zipin et al (2015), whose research on education (drawing on Bourdieu and Appadurai) usefully theorise three ways in which hopes are constituted through social-cultural processes. Doxic hopes are 'dominant norms about worthy futures' circulating through media and policy discourse. Habituated hopes are embodied dispositions grounded in biographic-historical conditions (habitus). Emergent hope are 'future-tending impulses' 'emerging among young people as their lives apprehend the present-becoming-future'.The qualitative data will be systematically generated, answering the research questions as directly as possible. NVivo will be used to organise and share data (transcripts, field notes and other materials). The comparative approach proposed under the rubric of the project will make three further contributions to knowledge-production. One, by bringing the UK, France and India within a common frame of investigation and analysis, the project will blur the boundaries between such categories as 'developed' and 'developing' countries, 'Global North' and 'Global South', and other such binaries that hinder an appreciation of the shared problems faced by people across these scholarly silos. Second, by recruiting an India-based researcher to conduct ethnographic research on poverty in the UK, the project will contribute to emerging methodological discussions on 'reversing the gaze'. Third, by adopting a collaborative approach to ethnography, the project will encourage the collaboration of researchers across national contexts and their interlocutors in the production of ethnographic texts.The research will be conducted by a multidisciplinary team offering complementary expertise. The in-depth ethnography favoured by sociologists and anthropologists will be complemented by innovative historical-institutional analysis developed by political scientists.