Graduate Student Workshop: South Asia Across Disciplines

 
This workshop brings together graduate students and faculty who are working on South Asia across different social science disciplines and fields. The meetings will offer students a chance to develop their scholarship and projects through discussions with students and faculty. Each meeting will involve the presentation of a graduate student’s current work-in-progress and will include a lunch.
About the talk:
The Foreigners’ Registration Office (FRO) in India has complex rules for Pakistani citizens, making it difficult for Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants to navigate regulations on their own. In this context, computer typists, who complete visa and residency forms, among other intermediary service providers, assume an important role as migration brokers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at an FRO in Rajasthan, this work-in-progress chapter examines what the integral role of middlemen in brokering interactions between refugee-migrants and lower-level bureaucrats reveals about the permeability of the state. Natasha Raheja argues that middlemen embody the blurriness of where the state begins and ends.
 
Natasha Raheja is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests are in the areas of state governance, citizenship, and migration, with a regional focus in South Asia.