Ekta Oza

India, Ph.D Candidate, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK 2022

Growing up in Conflict: Experiences, Friendships and Play for Children and Young People in Kashmir

Ekta Oza

Project Description

This project seeks to understand the experiences of children and young people growing up in Kashmir, and the extent to which everyday practices of peaceful living, friendship making, and play (re)produce spaces for everyday resistance in the context of the ongoing conflict. While rich feminist scholarship on Kashmir has focused on the experiences of women, scholars have persistently overlooked the experiences of children and young people. This research recognizes childhood and adulthood as a continuum rather than adulthood as the symbol of completeness and development, and childhood as a design of cultural and political immaturity and inferiority. By documenting the everyday narratives and experiences of children and young people growing up in Kashmir, this study examines how the conflict is experienced in their lives and the extent to which moments of everyday peace or less-than-violent spaces exist in this geopolitically significant region.

Bio

Ekta Oza is a PhD researcher at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK. She holds an MA in Psychosocial-Clinical Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Prior to her PhD, Ekta has worked as a child psychologist and as a researcher working on children and young people’s everyday experiences of living in a resettlement colony in New Delhi. Her research interests include geographies of childhood, psychoanalysis, peace and conflict studies, and ethnography.