Careful obstruction: rethinking urban knowledge formations from a protest site in India

Srilata Sircar, Raktim Ray and Ufaque Paiker

City, 2025, vol. 29, issue 3-4, 531-542

Abstract: Recent scholarship in critical urban studies has engaged with the idea of obstructions, blockades, and occupations as generative sites for political action and counter-hegemonic knowledge production. In this paper, we extend this analytical framing to understand women-led, sit-in-style protests in India against potential disenfranchisement through discriminatory legal amendments. Drawing from an extended oral history interview conducted with a group of nine organisers and participants of the anti-CAA/NRC protest in Ranchi, we develop the idea of ‘careful obstruction’ as a site of subaltern praxis from which to rethink urban politics and knowledge production. Imagining the sit-in protest as an act of careful obstruction enables us to consider the ways in which care can be practised in a counter-hegemonic way that disrupts the dominant logic of identity formation and state-sanctioned knowledge production, thereby emerging as a site to rethink what counts as urban knowledge.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2025.2517464

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