plotting home

This study began in 2018 and examines the ethics and politics of distributive justice and the centrality of community engagement to anthropological research on postwar contexts over time. It is situated in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, and I am working with Northern Hill Country Tamils who have migrated over three decades for various reasons related to the plantation industry, ethnonationalist violence, and civil war. This study will see if and how, in contexts of protracted displacement after the end of war and through and after resettlement, work continues to serve as a mode of potentially refashioning one’s place in the world through and in relation to historically sedimented ways of being known through histories caste oppression, migration, and dispossession. Specifically, how do labor and land attachments involve social and kinship relations and in doing so, move beyond the temporality and legality of transitional justice processes and the beginnings and ends of conflicts?

This project expands the field’s debates on the temporality, ethics, and reception of research on transitional justice in postwar settings to foreground the investments that families and households desire, sustain in their work and life endeavors. In doing so, it seeks to bring anthropological understandings of home into conversation with human rights and humanitarian frameworks of home-making. This study is being funded by the National Science Foundation and you can read the abstract for the award here.