Saba Sharma

Saba is a PhD student in the department of geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on experiences of the state and their relationship to ethnic conflict, looking at how practices of governance and policy affect the way different groups interact with the state and each other in Assam, in Northeastern India. Her project examines how the state is experienced in Northeast India, which remains a region of the country that is under-studied in scholarship, and features on the peripheries of the national imaginary. In looking at everyday practices of the state and their relationship to conflict, her research will try and ground some of these narratives within the larger narrative of state and nationalism in India. By studying this aspect of state practice, she hopes to draw links and parallels between concepts of state and citizenship in Assam, and similar ideas as they operate in other parts of India.