Call for Abstracts: Youth Dreams in South Asia. Imagining Pasts and Futures

Recent youth movements have toppled governments across South Asia (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal) and forced a minister's resignation in India. This workshop invites interdisciplinary papers exploring how young people across South Asia and its diaspora are imagining new political futures, and how these movements, despite shared grievances, diverge in their distinct demands and dreams.

The recent rise of youth movements in South Asia and across the diaspora continues longer histories of political mobilisation in the region, but also forges new trajectories, toppling governments in Sri Lanka (2022), Bangladesh (2024), and Nepal (2025). In India, the movements forced the education minister to resign. To prompt reflection on how young people across South Asia and the diaspora are envisioning political possibilities — some once considered unimaginable — we seek interdisciplinary presentations on themes that explore the nuances of contemporary youth dreams and the political imaginaries suffusing them. Focusing on the specific historical context(s) of contemporary youth movement(s), papers are invited to explore the layered ways young people dream about the future. Beyond questions of similarities such as whether demonstrations unfold online or offline and the role that social media play in driving these efforts to the streets, we seek to reorient the conversation and invite comparative reflections on how the protests within this series of uprisings, while raising similar complaints and leaning on similar strategies of mobilisation, have also tended to diverge from one another in their political expressions and objectives; how different protests have a distinct set of demands, ideas, and affect that animate it, while contributing to collective meaning-making with other protests.

Convenors: Dr. Gazal Shekhawat (University of Cambridge), Dr. Maria Awan (University of Oxford) and Dr. Fatma Khan (SOAS)