From Pastures to Cities: Skills and Youth Social Mobility in Urban Gujarat
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- MB C429
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This seminar examines how young Rabari pastoralists in urban Gujarat leverage caste and community networks to build new livelihoods beyond traditional herding. It explores their innovative, communitarian skill-ecosystem as a response to economic precarity and shifting opportunities.
The paper examines the occupational trajectories of young pastoralist (rabari) men as they turn to new livelihoods in place of livestock herding in urban Gujarat. In contrast to the dominant skill development narratives, the paper offers a micro view of how youth with limited education and financial resources rely on an alternative infrastructure of skills beyond the state and private sector to cope with economic precarity. What is the role played by caste and community networks in shaping youth aspirations for social mobility, the pursuit of new occupations and the acquisition of innovative skills? To what extent do youth manifest a new entrepreneurial spirit and individual-centric agency that is commonly associated with the advent of the neoliberal political economy? The findings reveal the workings of a communitarian skill-ecosystem that mobilises community networks, reinvents traditional practices and produces innovative cultures of skilling and entrepreneurship, whereby youth attempt to cope and survive in precarious urban landscapes.
About the speaker
Mona G. Mehta is Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Arts at the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She is a political scientist (PhD, University of Chicago) with research interests in urban transformations, democracy and middle class politics in the context of Gujarat and India at large. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the cultural politics of urban transformations and youth aspirations in post-liberalisation India. Her book explores what we can learn about India’s urbanisation by examining the trajectories of pastoralists or maldharis, who have increasingly settled into urban spaces, and their strategies to navigate the precarious urban informal economy. Her previous work explored the vulnerability and complicity of democratic and civic spaces in the production of exclusionary politics. Before joining Ahmedabad University, she has taught in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Scripps College in Claremont, USA (2010-2012) and in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (2012-2020).
The seminar will be chaired by Prof. Lyla Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, Visiting Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
Image credit: Yash Sarang via unsplash
