Final Year Project

Project Title

Checkpost Shenanigans: Bureaucratic Practices, Surveillance, and Spatial Politics in Karachi’s Malir Cantonment

Description

The study aims to understand how and to what extent bureaucratic-surveillance dominates military zones like Karachi’s Malir Cantonment. Although it is open to civilians, they are required to undergo levels of bureaucratic surveillance, indicating exclusionary and body politics. Such politics points towards a pressing question: what is the lived experience of bureaucratic practices, surveillance, and body politics in the civilian context in Malir Cantonment? To examine this question, domestic workers and residents who undergo the cantonments bureaucratic surveillance every day. The interviews focused on how bureaucratic practices interact with such politics. These politics are remnants of the colonial era; however, they have transitioned from being indicators of ‘difference’ to being indicators of subaltern practices and erasure; they demonstrate how classism and gendered inequalities are inherent to the functioning of cantonments. The theoretical framework employs a postcolonial, post-structuralist lens. Concepts posed by Gayatri Spivak and Doreen Massay were used to understand subalternity and spatial politics.