Dawa Tenzin Lokyitsang

DAWA LOKYITSAND, then a graduate student at University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, received a grant in April 2019 to aid research on ‘Kinship and Sovereignty in Exile: Care Interventions and Education in the Tibetan Refugee Community,’ supervised by Dr. Carole McGranahan. How does family ground political sovereignty? The modern political subject has long been associated with education, but in the case of the Tibetan refugee community, education had to be paired with the maintenance and creation of family ties to secure the national project. This project will study how Tibetan educational institutions (boarding schools) fostered notions of kinship and sovereignty in exile. This project will examine the shifting relationships of three generations of Tibetan schoolchildren in India to educational institutions, based in part on their differing and similar experiences of familyhood. This study decenters existing work on sovereignty-in-exile, which has been built largely on the interventions of state and NGO actors, by focusing on the work of Tibetans in creating and legitimizing a state-in-exile through an extensive network of pedagogical institutions. The project will consider the development of kinship through pedagogy through a historical lens, interviewing alumni and administrators of these schools as well as delving into archival work to support the ethnographic data produced through this project.