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What can a protest movement organised by Muslim grandmothers in India teach us about the role of care in political action? In what sense should we understand care as performance and everyday caring activities as artful practices? And how might interpersonal care nurture a wider caring imagination and foster a politics of care?
These are some of the questions we discuss in this episode, with Alisha Ibkar. Originally from Kaliachak in West Bengal, India, Alisha has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, and a Master of Arts degree, also in English Literature, from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Warwick, where she completed a Master’s degree in applied theatre, with her dissertation focusing on the study of ethics and the aesthetics of care in the context of political activism. Alisha is currently a School of Arts, Languages and Cultures doctoral fellow in Theatre and Performance at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama in the University of Manchester. Since 2016 she has also held the post of Assistant Professor of English Literature and Language at Aligarh Muslim University. In Manchester, Alisha is associated with The Care Lab, which is partnered with the AHRC-funded Care Aesthetics Research Exploration (CARE) Project, led by Professor James Thompson, who was my guest in Episode 11 of the podcast.
Alisha’s academic research places the burgeoning critical theorisations around the ethics and aesthetics of care in dialogue with socio-political protest movements, a context within which the relevance of caretaking is yet to be studied. Her research engages with women-led social movements in India to examine the extent to which care played a principal role, with her understanding of care emerging from Muslim women’s cultural and domestic practices of care. Through her work, Alisha seeks a decolonial reorientation, not only within care theory and scholarship, but also within political performance.
Alisha has published articles about her research in The Sociological Review and in Theatre Journal, and she has contributed a chapter entitled ‘On the art of Khidmat; political afterlives of Muslim women's everyday practices of care’ to a forthcoming collection on Care Aesthetics and the Arts, edited by Kate Maguire-Rosier, Réka Polonyi andJames Thompson.,
We discuss the following topics in this episode:
Alisha's early life in West Bengal and how it shaped her thinking about care and community (03:26)
The importance of education in Alisha's upbringing and her choice of English Literature as a focus for her studies (07:43)
The roots of Alisha's interest in theatre and performance (11:53)
Alisha's critical engagement with feminist writers on care (14:11)
The protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India (18:15)
The Shaheen Bagh protest and Alisha's relationship to it (21:52)
The ethos of care underlying the protest (25:10)
The practical care structures at Shaheen Bagh (30:42)
Care as performance (33:35)
The role of repetition and perpetuation in the performance of care (36:25)
Everyday caring activities as artful practices (41:21)
Storytelling as an ethical and aesthetic practice (46:21)
Interpersonal care nurturing a wider caring imagination (51:34)
The implications of Shaheen Bagh for thinking about protest as a form of care (57:18)
Shaheen Bagh as 'a template for a caring state' (01:01:30)
Alisha's involvement in The Care Lab and the CARE project in Manchester (01:05:40)
Some of the writers, thinkers and practitioners mentioned in the episode
Maurice Hamington (see Episode 6)
Mia Sosa-Provencio (see Episode 19)
Sarah Munawar (see Episode 13)
Other links
Jatra (Bengali folk theatre)
'Land of My Dreams' (film by Nausheen Khan)
You can download a transcript of the episode by following this link to the Careful Thinking Substack.
