CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
SPECIAL SEMINAR SERIES: CONSTITUTION @ 75
A Talk by
Professor Anupama Roy
On
Constitutions, Constitutional Identity, and Citizenship
Abstract: Constitutions hold out the promise of transformation even as they lay down systems and principles of governance for a political order. They often present the identity of a constitutional subject through narratives of ‘sameness and selfhood’ or through a constitutional worldview which offers different possibilities of pinning an identity. Constitutions, under ‘normal’ time or under conditions of ‘disharmony’ acquire salient features which give them a ‘discernable identity’. This paper would deploy citizenship as a category through which specific historical and contemporary discursive sites attributing an identity to the Constitution may be examined. By ‘reading’ the debates on citizenship in the Constituent Assembly in tandem with the ‘recall’ of citizenship by ‘authoritative interpretive communities’ e.g., the courts and Parliament, this paper would present the distinct ways in which the citizenship question is framed and resolved in these sites. Both – the framing and the resolution – the paper argues, reflect regimes of citizenship that present specific notions of citizenship as constitutional and authoritative.
3 PM, Friday 8th November 2024
Conference Room, CSLG, JNU
About the Speaker: Anupama Roy is a professor at the Centre for Political Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research and publications are in the fields of citizenship studies, political anthropology of public institutions, constitutionalism, law and democracy, and gender studies. Her most recent publication is Citizenship Regimes, Law and Belonging: the CAA and NRC in India (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is the co-author of the book Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties and author of Mapping Citizenship in India (OUP, 2010, 2014), Citizenship in India (Oxford short introduction series, 2016) and Gendered Citizenship: Historical and Conceptual Explorations (Orient Blackswan, 2005, 2013) She has co-edited Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy (Springer 2020) and Poverty, Gender and Migration in South Asia (Sage, 2008). She regularly contributes to academic journals. She was a senior fellow in the Centre for Women’s Development Studies before joining JNU and has been a visiting scholar at various universities. She was Sir Ratan Tata post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi and a Key Technology Partner Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
All are welcome. Please take your seats early. Please join us for tea after the seminar.