Emergent Conversation 25

Introduction to the series
First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies, and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South

By Sana Malik

How does one write about hope, let alone feel hopeful, in the midst of ongoing crises, genocidal violence, climate change, and relentless indeterminacies that mediate our day-to-day lives in the current moment? This series was conceived in the context of late Covid-19, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, devastating floods in Pakistan, and during my own personal crisis: a cancer diagnosis in my thirties. Needless to say, our present historical conjuncture is rife with uncertainty, anxiety, and indeterminacy, marked by all sorts of crises that are unfolding at every possible scale of analysis and experience (Lindquist 2024; Nugent & Suhail 2024). Ordinary people of the Global South find themselves at the epicenter of these global climate, political, and social crises—becoming veritable “first-responders” to these crises—before their aftershocks reverberate to other parts of the world. Yet, the initial victims of these crises are often the ones reminding others of the ways in which joy, hope, and gratitude may be sought in the bleakest of times.[1]

This series attends to narratives of hope and joyful determination from across the Global South, from people modelling a critical willingness to keep going despite the challenges and oppressions of our times (Ahmed 2017), and as a foil to romanticized notions of hope and resilience that abound in mainstream media. While anthropologists have long studied the suffering of cultural others, they have also offered helpful frames of attending to indeterminacy, through the lens of liminality (Turner 1969) and in-betweenness to explore how life is made livable in, and despite, these circumstances. In the new millennium, analytical attention has been paid to anthropologies of the good (Robbins 2013) that emphasize the study of possibility, morality, and well-being among communities (Graeber 2007, Laidlaw 2002); empathy and care (Hollan & Throop 2008); and time, change, and hope (Deeb 2009, Greenberg 2016; Robbins 2013). Attending to the indeterminacies of everyday life in the Global South, this series asks: what avenues of well-being, hope, and community are made, remade, and lost in moments of indeterminacy?

These essays offer interdisciplinary reflections on hope, uncertainty, and aspiration in various fragmented political landscapes, by exploring social habits, forms of kinship, and friendships in South and Southeast Asia. Ranging from urban and peri-urban settings across India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, the essays in this series are set in formal sites such as local courts, and everyday spaces of public engagement such as neighborhood parks and roadside markets—where nothing spectacular seems to be happening (Howe 2016).

By bringing together essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and lawyers, this series attempts to model interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. Sandhya Fuch’s article offers an ethnographic insight into how lower-caste women and minorities seek fractured hope in India through their engagements with the law. Angbeen Mirza’s essay on women prisoners in Sheikhupura Jail, Lahore, offers a unique insight into women’s intimate spaces, and the slivers of joy and camaraderie possible within spaces of carceral punishment, violence, and colonial logics. Rachel Rinaldo’s piece explores gendered “pivots” that housewives and small-scale businesswomen undertook in Indonesia as they navigated economic losses and their new roles as breadwinners during Covid-19. Sana Malik’s ethnographic reflection concludes the series, offering an insight into friendships among conservative women and housewives in Lahore, Pakistan, forged in a public park during Covid-19. It reflects on how these friendships become transformative in mediating women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers through newfound political subjectivities and forms of engagement with a populist political party in Pakistan.

While hope is often regarded as an ephemeral or fleeting affect in legal spaces, and the law is often critiqued for its limitations and failures in anthropological scholarship, Sandhya Fuchs’ article encourages us to question how hope materializes in contexts of crisis and indeterminacy—not as an outcome, but rather as an endurant, habitual condition. In her article, Fuchs uses insightful ethnographic accounts to illustrate how despite the lack of welcome legal outcomes for caste and religious minorities in Indian courts, the practice of using legal tools serves as an “act of defiant hope.” Building on Dewey and Ambedkar’s approaches to social transformation, Fuchs engages with hope as a verb, rather than a state, that is not rooted in optimism but rather meliorism: the wish to make conditions of possibility comparatively better, through the creation of legal and social counter-habits. She offers two case studies in her essay to elucidate these counter-habits: how survivors of caste discrimination constantly negotiate and mobilize hate crime laws in Rajasthan despite low conviction rates of perpetrators; and among legal practitioners representing Muslim cases in courts amid rising Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Despite the gritty, hopeful laboring entailed in these cases, Fuchs shows us how these counter-habits keep hope alive for caste and religious minorities in India, moving minoritized bodies into legal spaces from which they have been excluded.

Angbeen Mirza’s thought-provoking essay takes us on a journey of ironic hope as she observes the intimate spaces of a women’s prison quarters in Lahore, Pakistan. Mirza suggests that Sheikhupura prison is a place of contrasts, from the floral, manicured prison garden to the staid, colonial layout of the inmates’ living quarters. Through the moving story of prison kingpin Amma Jee, we learn how female friendships and selfless acts of childcare and caregiving abound among inmates, who are otherwise marked as criminal or dangerous figures outside the prison walls. The blurring of horizontal relations of power between prison staff and inmates may paint an almost rosy picture of sisterhood in the prison cells, but instead of offering a romanticized notion of community, the piece hints at a politics of possibility in dehumanizing spaces and times. The intimacy Mirza describes in the liminal spaces of the women’s prison is a reminder of how pastoral care (Peletz 2020) is often folded into punitive, carceral institutions that are tasked with disciplining transgressive, gendered bodies. Mirza ends her piece on a poignant note, stating, “Ironically, it is in prison, where their [inmates’] freedoms and liberty are formally taken away, that many women may be able to experience liberty and a freedom from fear for the first time in their lives.”

Rachel Rinaldo’s essay moves the series from the legal to economic sphere, shifting our attention towards women-led businesses in Yogyakarta, Indonesia that were hit dramatically by Covid-19 closures. Offering the framework of pivoting as a praxis in moments of crisis, Rinaldo describes how her interlocutors took creative risks, and in some cases became “reckless,” to provide financial stability for their families during the pandemic. During Covid, the rise in female labor force participation in Indonesia was driven by informal work in the service and agricultural sectors. Rinaldo’s piece provides a nuanced insight into this phenomenon, showing how in addition to fulfilling the heavy burdens of domestic and caregiving responsibilities during Covid, Indonesian women were taking on labor outside the home by running businesses such as roadside restaurants and food carts. In doing so, women were not only working alongside their husbands but often bringing in more money than them—effectively becoming breadwinners of the household. While this was an unusual position for women in Indonesia, and certainly a testament to women’s adaptability and creativity in unsettled times, it reinforces how the Indonesian state and society rely heavily on women’s labor and precarity to provide care and income, especially during moments of prolonged indeterminacy.

Sana Malik’s ethnographic piece reflects on unlikely friendships among conservative Pakistani women and housewives in a public park, forged during Covid-19 lockdowns in Lahore. Building on the life story of her main interlocutor Naz Aunty, this piece theorizes a “politics of the middle” as a frame to understand the tensions Naz Aunty and her friends experience as they navigate their domestic duties as mothers and wives with their newfound friendships and political subjectivities. While these women lament that they got “stuck in the middle” of their mothers-in-law and daughters’ generations, their new friendships help them carve out middle spaces to exert their political aspirations outside of their domestic roles. Reflecting on the push and pull of her shifting subjectivities in public and private spheres, Naz Aunty reminds us of the temporality of hope, and how her political activities and friendships are only made possible after decades of struggle in her youth.

In Rinaldo and Malik’s pieces, the rupture of Covid serves as an important site of possibility for women to pivot into newer, gendered public spheres and political arenas, after being confined to their homes performing caregiving duties for most of their lives. Malik’s piece overlaps with reflections on hope throughout the series as her interlocutors display aspects of defiant hope—by joining a political party that offers fragmented political possibilities to women and women’s issues in Pakistan; unlikely forms of kinship—through new and situational friendships cultivated in a neighborhood park during the pandemic; and a political hope engendered by her interlocutors’ acts of  risk-taking—or recklessness—in the public sphere.

By exploring avenues of hope and possibility in South and Southeast Asia, this series acknowledges social transformations and transnational movements being spearheaded by women and minorities globally. The essays in this series show that although ordinary people of the Global South find themselves at the epicenter of contemporary global climate, political, and social crises before the aftershocks reverberate to other parts of the world, they are also arguably already at the center of transformative political, social, and legal movements. By exploring myriad forms of hope and possibility in South and Southeast Asia, this series attends to sites of knowledge production where issues of social justice and human rights are setting the stage for new movements among younger generations and increased transnational solidarities among ordinary actors in the Global South in the age of new media (Herrera & Bayat 2010). While these practices of hope may not always have liberatory outcomes for women and minorities or offer structural changes to their everyday circumstances, they are important reminders of the agency and unrelenting labor of ordinary people who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible in the punitive, unstable, and violent world in which we live.

Sana Malik received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2025. Her research explores the diverse political trajectories of feminist and non-feminist activists participating in Pakistan’s emerging public spheres. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Sana curated an Emergent Conversation on “First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South” that highlights narratives of how people make everyday life livable amidst ongoing indeterminacies in the Global South.

Notes

[1] And in the very recent words of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s acceptance speech, “Hope is alive!” (Mamdani 2025).

Works Cited

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Graeber, David. 2007. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire. AK Press.

Greenberg, Jessica. 2016. “Being and Doing Politics: Moral Ontologies and Ethical Ways of Knowing at the End of the Cold War.” In Impulse to Act. A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice, edited by Othon Alexandrakis. Pp. 19-40. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Herrera, Linda, and Asef Bayat, eds. 2010. Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy?: Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385-401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00023.x

Howe, Cymene. 2016. “Negative Space: Unmovement and the Study of Activism When There is No Action.” In Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice, edited by Othon Alexandrakis. Pp. 161-182. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Laidlaw, James. 2002. “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (2): 311-332.

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Mamdani, Zohran. “Hope Is Alive: A Full Transcript of Mayor-Elect’s Victory Speech to Supporters.” The Nation. November 5, 2025. Accessed November 10, 2025: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-victory-speech/.

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Peletz, Michael G. 2020. Sharia Transformations: Cultural Politics and the Rebranding of an Islamic Judiciary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447- 462. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42001631.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (First Edition). London: Routledge.