Mobilities, Communication, and Asia| Logics of Mobility: Social Movements and Their Networked Other

Abstract

Issues of mobility and agency are central to how we understand the success of social movement organizing. This study examines these issues by unpacking the twin logics of networking and displacement as they drive organizing around Indigenous access to land in India. It first traces the shape of national-level networking in movement organizing, focusing on both alliances and fractures related to the passage and subsequent implementation of the Forest Rights Act, which enables Adivasi groups across the country to determine and exercise their historic rights of access to forest lands. The study then shifts scale to analyze how logics of displacement were manifested among the Jenu Kuruba tribe in and around Bandipur in South India, identifying four major phases of displacement. I bring these logics together to argue that the outcome and attendant agency of social movement organizing is often shaped by the place of the networked other in relation to the movement, and that viewing the networked other as incorporated, resistive or deprived, shapes how movement agency and success is understood in instrumental, affective, and constitutive terms, respectively.