As a Ph.D. student of anthropology at Cornell University, I am studying how Nepali students undertake university politics as a gateway into statewide politics. Historically in South Asia, politics at the university level have had a powerful impact on statewide politics and social change through the mobilization of masses, the entrenching of political party ideology, and the production of career politicians. My dissertation research examines student activism within the larger scope of democratic activism in Nepal’s political history, in order to determine how younger generations are motivated to seek political and social change. I am tracking the process whereby students become involved in national political life, and transform political culture by emphasizing society’s emergent needs while simultaneously becoming socialized into the political forms that they are trying to change.

This project operates on two broad levels. I seek to connect an analysis of the production of a political imaginary to sociological processes related to political structures, governance, and social movements. I am investigating network formation and party structure, collecting and analyzing tangible artifacts such as speeches, media releases, political commentary, and policy statements, while also ethnographically engaging the politics that students are doing as a cultural lifestyle. Networks are particularly central to my study. The students have cultivated larger networks in response to the limitations imposed by the current political impasse between the parties, the king, and the Maoist insurgents. They are seeking broader political networks that operate in the discourse of human and democratic rights while also maintaining local networks emphasizing Nepali civic nationalism. By making direct contact with international media, observers, policy analysts, and lobbyists the students are lobbying for international support to reinstate democracy in Nepal. They are also trying to reconnect with general Nepali students in order to shift their struggle from the realm of party politics, on which they focused during active democracy, to the realm of social activism in which they are fighting for the public’s democratic rights. I will diagram these networks, in order to demonstrate how the Nepali political imaginary is strategically being shaped by transnational liberal democratic ideology in a culturally discursive fashion.

This research has been most recently shaped by a Fulbright research grant in 2003-2004, during which I studied self-assessed notions of citizenship, political consciousness, and governmentality by looking at formal and hidden academic and social curricula in the secondary schools and universities in Nepal. I looked at both private and public high schools and universities to observe the historical and current nature of students’ developing awareness of their agency as citizens, and, more importantly, how students choose to affect social change, whether it be by joining the Maoist insurgency, becoming involved in student political unions, taking up civic service, or segregating themselves from politics in order to pursue other opportunities such as business.

Analytic interests: Social Movements, Activism and Political Participation, Youth, Political Anthropology, Law and Societies, Power, Theories of the State, Engagement of Political Hope, Political Discourse and Indoctrination, Knowledge Production, Intellectuals and Nationalism, and Elites.