On 10 June 2024, Mausumi Chetia defended her thesis investigating the roles that power, community identity, agency and collective actions play in various home-making processes.
The focus of her thesis was 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.
Her thesis makes the relationship between emotional and psychological experiences of home and the practices of human(in) security more explicit. She argued 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.
Rewatch Mausumi's defence introduction
- Researcher
