Home

This session is a presentation of two papers by the three team members on the theme of home and the internet for Dalit-Bahujan and Tribal students in India along the intersections of queer, disabled and North Eastern identity-based experiences. With qualitative interviews of women and queer students, and students with psychosocial disabilities in higher education, we bring out narratives of how the pandemic has affected the idea of home for them, how their cross-cutting intersectional identities have played a role in their experience of the real and the digital space, how the burden of labour has changed for women students in these times, how the social movements took shape within the contours of the home and on the internet, and what are the mental health impacts of these experiences on these students. The papers will be partly autoethnographic as the research questions have evolved from the personal experiences of the researchers themselves. The session is planned as a panel discussion between three scholars on three distinct, interconnected notions of home – specifically the home as a dwelling unit, an administrative unit (such as a municipality, a city, or a state), and a country (or a nation state) in the context of India. We intend to parse these ideas within the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to discuss notions of ‘safety’, ‘trust’, ‘support’, and ‘access’ by examining the digital turn in all three kinds of ‘home’. The session will open with the scholars speaking to each other, and laying out the central ideas. The conversation between the three scholars will act as provocations to enable a larger discussion with other attendees.