The Politics of Space and Everyday Surveillance in a Delhi Homelessness Shelter: An Ethnographic Exploration

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a unique lens through which to theorize neoliberal governance from the perspective of the politics of space and everyday surveillance in Akash Sadan, a Delhi homeless shelter. Drawing from interview data and over two years of ethnographic research with children (boys and girls), their families, and civil society and state representatives, I bring theories of homelessness, surveillance, and spatialized control as they connect to scholarship on governance, regulation, and stigmatization into conversation with Miraftab’s (2004) framework on the mutually constitutive concepts of “invited” and “invented” spaces of participation. Extending this framework, I conceptualize the Aakash Sadan shelter as an “invited,” state-sanctioned space supported by a state-legitimized non- governmental organization (NGO). I argue that regulatory power operates through spatial territorialism and stigmatized surveillance exercised by an NGO primarily in league with the state. This stigmatization is inseparable from the community’s historically enforced precarity and state-induced dispossession. The empirical case of the Aakash Sadan shelter thus demonstrates how the convergence of these spatial features in a state-sanctioned community can leave residents with reduced access to basic and urgently needed services, heightening experiences of poverty and precarity.

Keywords

• space
• surveillance
• homelessness
• politics