(Un)making precarities: geographies of youth, race & citizenship among Afghan refugee youths in India
Keywords: India
youth geographies
South Asia
critical geopolitics
refugee

This thesis draws on 8.5 months of fieldwork with ethnographic approaches to examine the everyday precarious lives of young Afghan refugees aged between 18 and 30 years in New Delhi, India. Using narrative accounts of young Afghan men and women at various stages in their educational journeys, this paper provides an alternative narrative of the refugee-student voice that examines personal aspirations, agency, emotions and active engagements of young people in an unexpected social, political and economic landscape. Although all refugees and asylum seekers in India have access to government education services, access is not universally attainable or desirable as some students instead assume familial responsibility and find work in the (in)formal sectors. Collectively, I shape this thesis into three empirical chapters which examine the spatial and temporal aspects of young refugee youths’ everyday practices of citizenship, higher education and sociality despite the precarity of their refugee status. I employ a conceptual framework of relationality in order to critically examine the complexity of young Afghan refugees’ everyday lives. Relationality crosses spatial scales, from individual body to socially embedded approaches intersecting processes of globalization and the ways in which these change through time. Young urban refugees in India are an educationally, socially, economically and ethno-religiously diverse group. My analysis interrogates these scalar connections within and across different spaces, underscoring the everyday lived experiences, imaginaries and strategies. This is significant to the ways young Afghan refugees are framing their social lives and generational changes in education spaces, in community life, and in the wider Indian society. In doing so, my research makes a series of contributions to ongoing debates around refugee youths in the global South, geographies of friendship, higher education and citizenship. I reflect on the ways to reflect on “the everyday” as a locus of social change and continuity through a relational approach that places an emphasis on the quality and nature of connections and relationships provides a valuable framework for understanding young people’s lives.
I examine the link between the bureaucratic demands of waiting and the barriers faced by young refugees who seek access to higher education and are often rendered ‘invisible’ within Indian civil society. I raise the question of how this marginalisation is imposed and countered at the institutional level. Moreover, I advance an understanding of contemporary refugee students’ socioeconomic and cultural transitions in India and their contested futures by understanding the socially differentiated ways young Afghans negotiate varying temporal dimensions of identity, mobility and alternative constructions of citizenship. My analysis in this thesis supports the case for a multi-sited methodological approach in order to locate youth refugees within the significant social relations that shape their everyday lives. Secondly, the scale of the everyday offers productive insights into the ways in which political, social and cultural changes associated with globalization in contemporary India are affecting marginalised populations. I take a broader approach to understanding the precarious lives of youth Afghan refugees to examine how young people conceive of, strategize, and transform their social practices in multifaceted ways.