The politics of (un)feeling: violence, affect, and minoritised citizenship

Khan, Fatma (2024) The politics of (un)feeling: violence, affect, and minoritised citizenship. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis examines everyday processes of survival, citizenship, and political subject formation in the wake of anti-minority violence. Highlighting the communicative and psychosocial aspects of violence, I focus on the processes and outcomes of minoritisation: the citizen-subject formation including the suppression, contestation, remaking and performance of political subjectivities. Embracing a disability justice perspective, my ethnographic fieldwork includes semi-structured and informal unstructured interviews, participant observation, and analysis of media artefacts. My findings are presented in three ethnographic chapters. These empirical chapters address the ways in which physical violence, mediated violence, and infrastructural violence intersect in everyday experiences and theorise the new affects, survival strategies and social formations which come into being within besieged communities. Understanding minoritised citizenship through the lens of relationality, I contrast how people from different social locations navigate and articulate notions of belonging in relation to the self, interpersonal relationships, neighbourhood, different communities, the state, and the nation. Focusing on mediated public cultures, I conclude that navigating majoritarian structures of feeling results in shifting modes of minoritarian (un)feeling, that deeply impacts experiences of time, mobility, imaginations of the future, and community. I delve into the multifaceted nature of unfeeling and disaffection as minoritarian practices of survival, while also highlighting the dangers, limitations, and failures of these modes of being. This thesis makes an original contribution to studies of citizenship, media and communications, and minorities through the lens of affect and disability justice. By foregrounding questions of accountability, solidarity, and justice within the research process, and emphasis on care-based ways of knowing and being, the chapters also contribute to literature on the ethics of being in relation when researching violence.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Fatma Khan
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Sets:	Departments > Media and Communications
Supervisor:	Banaji, Shakuntala and Willems, Wendy
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4755

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