A duty of care

: narrating anti-authoritarian resistance

Abstract

How can scholars caringly narrate antiauthoritarian resistance, attending to activists’ lives beyond the protest site? Through in-depth research among people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act and around the 2020 Delhi pogrom, I develop the concept of caring narration to broaden scholarly understandings of how activists’ non-protest lives are shaped by their experiences of authoritarian violence and antiauthoritarian resistance.

Learning from Black scholarship on recombinant narratives, I call attention to entangled, affective, and stretched chronologies of the anti-CAA protests that respect the fragmented and atemporal nature of my interlocutors’ relational narratives.

Methodologically, I explore walks, dis/ease, and friendship as queer-feminist approaches for following and unearthing these fragmented narrations.

To understand how authoritarian violence percolates into activists’ non-protest lives – affecting their relationships, livelihoods, and homes in both generative and inhibitive ways – I suggest that protestors’ experiences of stuckness are important to caring narration.

I explore how activists enact care at protests to resist stuckness. In conversation with performance artists in the anti-CAA movement, I suggest that such care constitutes a unique concept of protest performance where theatricality and performativity coalesce in sites of heightened government surveillance.

Protest performance, I argue, instils in activists a sense of justice and a radical habitus, an intergenerational duty of care that shapes their lives beyond the protest site.

Lastly, drawing from scholarship on futurities, I present my interlocutors’ dreamlessness – both an oneiric flatness and struggles to imagine hopeful futures – as an important theme of caringly narrating antiauthoritarian resistance.

Ultimately, I argue that narrating with care and narrating care permits the telling of stories that aren’t just about motivations, methods, or the suffering associated with antiauthoritarian resistance, but which prioritise resistors – their silences, their stucknesses, what it takes for them to enact care, how it changes them, and what they’re left with on a sleepless night.

Date of Award	1 Dec 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Roxani Krystalli (Supervisor) & Rahul Rao (Supervisor)