Contemporary Kashmir valley is seen in a terminal colonial situation within India. Since the armed movement broke out in 1989, the Indian government has deployed massive number of armed troops and implemented lethal counter-insurgency laws. Human rights groups claim that over 70,000 people have been killed and more than 8000 men have been forcibly disappeared in custody by the Indian army. This study focuses on the women activists of the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons who organized in 1994 to search for the disappeared men. The everyday gendered politics of mourning emerges as, what I conceptualize as "affective law" which reveals a fine-grained understanding of women's agency that does not appear as only stereotypically confrontational but as nuancedly cultural. I trace the genesis of affective law within the paradigm of hauntology; a spectral space, of departure and return of the disappeared. The hauntological interiorization emerges as mourning, memory, and resistance. The women use performative politics which converges in the spectacle of mourning and allows them to transcend the limitations of the heavily militarized society. The performative politics of mourning makes it possible to resist oppression and through forms memory capture what might be rendered insignificant by hegemonic discourses of the state. The analysis of the work of mourning as a mode of affective politics traces women's social invisibility and how they become visible in the public. The activist-women emerge as agents of change that alter social constructions relating to body, justice, human rights and gender.

The single disappearing body becomes a crucial counterpart in the state's political economy. The state's surveillance thinly masked in the disappearance becomes a symbol of panopticism - a theater, symbol, and a ritual. Even though spectacle has been conceptualized as separate, in this dissertation enforced disappearances come closer to the spectacular nature of punishment and become a "staging" visible to thousands of eyes. Thus, the society of surveillance emerges as deeply enmeshed with the spectacle and not as mutually exclusive. The spectacle of gendered activism allows tracing the state of exception that India has created in Kashmir valley. The punitive measures imposed by India, become means of forced assimilation of Kashmir. In this dissertation we see how the state becomes operational through dual modes including punitive measures like enforced disappearances and what is termed as military humanitarianism. The state terror emerges as a part of foundational violence for an ethnonational struggle to consolidate the Indian nation on what were pre-1947 heterogeneous territories.

This dissertation is an ethnography of an artistic neighborhood, Jabal al Luweibde in Amman. It aims to call attention to a spatial politics of art, distinct from the expressive or meaningful politics more often attended to in studies of art. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including extensive participant observation, interview, and archival research, this dissertation traces Jabal al Luweibde’s emergence as an artistic neighborhood and analyzes how, as artists center in this neighborhood, they rework boundaries of inclusion and exclusion along lines of class, gender, and national origin. It also examines how art’s rising political and economic power, closely tied to wider economic changes, has led to this neighborhood becoming known as a uniquely inclusive site, hailed by politicians and planners as an idealized image of Amman’s potential future. This neighborhood is a transformative site of political possibility in Amman, opening different futures, transforming communal boundaries, and setting the stage for confrontation. By tracing these developments, the dissertation develops theorization of a dynamic, agentive, urban politics, rooted in the structural and aesthetic impacts of discreet artistic practices.

This Dissertation analyzes the findings of a two-year ethnography of an American CrossFit community. CrossFit is a world-wide sport and fitness brand, with over 13,500 franchised fitness affiliates around the world and an annual sporting competition: The CrossFit Games. While CrossFit is beginning to become the subject of some ethnographic research, there has yet to be published a long-term in-depth ethnographic study of a CrossFit community and its participants. Research questions investigated how and why an increasing number of American women are seeking larger and stronger muscularity, how neoliberal discourses of health are internalized and enacted at the level of individuals and communities, and what role fitness plays within processes of subjectification under late capitalism. This study, which includes participant observation, 37 interviews, and a body-idealization survey, reveals three major findings of great significance affecting theories and embodied practices of neoliberal discourses of health, the self as a project, and ideal femininity, all within the ideological framework of Biopower (Foucault; Hardt and Negri) and the Biopolitics of neoliberal capitalism. Key findings include the following: 1) CrossFit discourses of health align with neoliberal ideologies of Healthism (Crawford) while also exceeding these ideologies, 2) the primary motivation of individual CrossFit participants is the pursuit of meaning-making and purpose through processes of perpetual becoming, self-realization and self-care via the self as a project, which is accelerated through collective effervescence (Durkheim), and 3) female muscularity is greatly encouraged and valorized, within new limits that also enable some forms of agency and resistance.

This dissertation examines the overlooked experiences of dispossession among Rwanda's Indigenous Twa minority in the aftermath of genocide. Despite extensive scholarly attention on post-genocide Rwanda, little consideration has been given to the unique circumstances faced by the Twa, Rwanda's original inhabitants and only Indigenous micro-minority. Through a comprehensive ethnographic exploration, this research analyzes the intersecting dynamics of environmental governance, transitional justice, and nation-building projects that have shaped the Twa's marginalization. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in Rwanda, including more than 50 interviews and extensive participant observation, this study uncovers the systematic and multi-formed dispossession experienced by the Twa. Environmental governance and transitional justice policies have rendered the Twa invisible, denying them the right to identify ethnically or as an Indigenous group. Consequently, they face eviction from their ancestral lands, exclusion from conservation initiatives, and marginalization within Rwandan society. Despite Rwanda's ambitious goals to transform the nation into a "non-ethnic" luxury eco-tourist destination, the Twa remain excluded from these initiatives, perpetuating their impoverishment and dispossession. Furthermore, the legal limitations on Indigenous discourse hinders the Twa's ability to advocate for their rights and challenge state-sponsored expropriation. This research contributes to broader anthropological discussions of dispossession by analyzing the ideological underpinnings perpetuating marginalization and dispossession. By centering the experiences of the Twa, this study challenges dominant narratives of Rwandan history and ethnicity, highlighting the symbolic significance of the Twa in understanding identity formation and reconciliation processes.