Duncan McDuie-Ra – författare

For a city in India's northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia's longest-running separatist conflict, Dimapur remains 'off the map'. With no 'glorious' past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur's essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of the everyday life, lived reality of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space.Ceasefire City captures the dynamics of Dimapur. It brings together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces and illustrates the embodied experiences of the city. The first part explores military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur. The second part presents an ethnographic account of lived realities and the meanings that are forged in a frontier city.

While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.

Race debates have become more frequent at the national level, and the response to racism in the media and by politicians has shifted from denial to acknowledgment to action. Focusing on the experiences of communities from India's Northeast borderland, the author explores the dynamics of race debates in contemporary India.

Insurgent Play: Social worlds of urban disruption explores play as a transgressive expression that counters the existing urban order (neoliberal, authoritarian, militarised). Insurgent play is disruptive, yet through disruption it brings social worlds into being, undergirds global subcultures and overcomes hostile urban environments characterised by ever-diminishing spaces for free expression. Acts of insurgent play are claims on space lasting from brief moments to years, animating patches of the city designed for commercial, industrial and logistical imperatives. Even in public spaces designed for leisure and play, insurgent play brings different expressions at different speeds, transgressing designated uses and bodily expectations. Through insurgent play people find belonging in the city, especially for those excluded from other spaces based on race, class, sexuality and citizenship. As such, stories of insurgent play are stories of alternative ways of inhabiting cities stemming from the widespread human desire and need for play, for joy and for sociality.Insurgent Play draws upon examples from street skateboarding. Street skateboarding disrupts the city in the pursuit of play, enlivens patches of space through temporary claims, and initiates encounters with authorisers, property owners and citizens gravid with hostility with instants of wonder. Insurgence is a way of being, and the desire for insurgent play cannot be placated by better urban planning or formal expertise. Nor will multiplying designated play spaces, creative precincts and ‘flexible’ public spaces stop people seeking out space to create their own worlds of disruption.The book makes four arguments. First, insurgent play is bodily expression that can challenge, disrupt and transgresses dominant ways of city-making. Second, insurgent play takes us to parts of the urban landscape that we might not otherwise go, politics we might not otherwise recognise and encounters we might otherwise overlook. Third, claims on the city made through insurgent play enliven urban space through transformative power. In this way, these claims territorialise patches of the built environment intended for other uses. Last, insurgent play space is generated from below, never above. Insurgent play shapes, and is shaped by, identities that position adherents in opposition to prevailing urban orders.

By focusing on climate security as it is constructed in the Pacific and how this concept mobilises resources and shapes the implementation of climate finance, the book provides an up-to-date account of the way regional organizations in the Pacific have contributed to the search for solutions to the problem of climate insecurity.

By focusing on climate security as it is constructed in the Pacific and how this concept mobilises resources and shapes the implementation of climate finance, the book provides an up-to-date account of the way regional organizations in the Pacific have contributed to the search for solutions to the problem of climate insecurity.

This is an ethnographic study of migrants from India's north-east border region living and working in Delhi, the nation's capital, Northeast India borders China, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia.

This volume explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.

I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at oncedelinquent and magnificent.