PhD defence by Mausumi Chetia

She takes a historical-structural approach to disaster-related displacements, contextualising their after-effects within the simultaneity of the long-term crises in the region and their governance.

She takes a three-pronged approach to home:

• as imaginative and material
• as the nexus of collective power and identity
• as an entity governed at a multiscalar level

The focus of her thesis is on the borderland region of Assam in India. Communities living close to the Brahmaputra River in Assam have been affected by recurring riverbank erosion and floods for many generations. Their effects include internal displacements and the many complexities surrounding erosion-related rehabilitation.

Chatia's thesis makes the relationship between emotional and psychological experiences of home and the practices of human(in) security more explicit. She argues that the diverse meanings of home as felt and lived by the self-rehabilitated communities are shaped intimately and continuously by power relations between the state, the power elites and the self-rehabilitated communities; and by the community’s situated agency vis-a-vis its location in the hierarchies of the pre-displacement social structures.

Doctoral Board

Chair

Professor Ruard Ganzevoort

Doctoral dissertation supervisor

Professr Thea Hilhorst
Professor Des Gasper
Dr Sunil Tankha

Full Doctoral Committee

• Dr Swargajyoti Gohain, Ashoka University
• Professor Ksenia Chmutina, Loughborough University
• Dr Nibedita Ray-Bennett, University of Leicester
• Professor Jan Willem Duyvendak, University of Amsterdam
• Professor Shuaib Lwasa, ISS