In Search of Home
Citizenship, Law and the Politics of the Poor
Description:... In Search of Home explores new, yet less explored space of urban poverty – rehabilitation housing that houses the displaced poor and increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. It examines the politics of the poor focusing on law, citizenship and gender. Contesting the assumption that illegalities emerge due to lack of legal rights to property, this ethnography of the everyday narrates how the rehabilitated poor despite legal residence experience 'citizenship in limbo', suspended between an illegal past and an imagined future of full citizenship. The book details the flexible governance of such neighbourhoods, studying how the state produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain. By looking at how systemic corruption draws urban poor groups into webs of exchanges with the state, de-radicalising and co-opting the poor, it exposes the gendered underbelly of urban poor struggles, uncovering the role women play in eliciting the paternalism of the state.
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