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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research

Sahar Romani

Youth post-NGO: development and experiments in growing up in India

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Academic Profile

Sahar is a DPhil Candidate at the School of Geography and the Environment, supported by the Clarendon Fund. Sahar received her Bachelors of Arts in English, Magna Cum Laude from Seattle University in 2002. She completed her Masters of Arts in International Studies - South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in 2008. Sahar's research interests include youth geographies, development, contemporary South Asia, critical pedagogy, and feminist methodologies. Sahar has worked as a popular educator in India and the United States.

Awards
  • 2010-2013 - Clarendon Scholarship, University of Oxford
  • 2007-2008 - Foreign Language Area Study Award (Bangla), University of Washington

Current Research

Sahar's research centres on subaltern youth and the politics of development in urban India. Through situated ethnography, Sahar seeks to explore the lives of subaltern young people post-NGO as a medium to analyse and interrogate the political and cultural effects of development.

Over the past three decades, NGOs are exploding across cities, towns, and villages in India shaping and implementing development agendas for marginalized and disadvantaged communities, especially youth and children. Subaltern young people and children from under-resourced communities often grow up with NGOs. For some subaltern youth, NGOs are homes and families; they serve as shelter, school, kitchens, and community. But what happens to young people once they turn 18 and 'age-out' or 'graduate' from NGOs? What becomes of them post-NGO? Sahar examines the post-NGO landscapes of the 'subjects of development' in Kolkata with attention to young people's cultural and political aspirations, opportunities, and (im)mobilities as a case to understand the politics of NGOs and development in urban India. The central questions underpinning her research include:

  1. What happens to young people after they've 'grown up' with NGOs? Where do they go? What do they do? How do the role of NGOs impact their economic, social, political present and futures? How might an understanding of young people's lives inform our understanding of development in urban India?
  2. How is development a cultural process of subject-ification? What is the relationship between NGOs and subaltern young people's subjectivities? What kind of subjectivities are NGOs in liberalized India producing and seeking to produce? What does this imply for the politics of citizenship?
  3. What is the political culture of NGOs in contemporary India? How do the youth 'subjects' of NGOs resist and reproduce the current political culture of development?