Ranu Kunwar is a PhD candidate in anthropology in the School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University. Her research seeks to understand informal urbanism in Siliguri by attending to everyday socio-spatial practices that enable street hawkers to forge social, spatial, and political claims on the markets and the city. Ranu also holds an MPhil degree in English from the University of Delhi where she studied Tibetan life-narratives in the diaspora. Her research interests include informal labour, urban spatial productions, and Nepali identity politics in India.

Asaf Ali Lone is a PhD candidate at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. His research looks at the intersections of peacebuilding, justice, reconciliation, accountability, and reparations in South Asia and its diasporic communities focussed on missing persons in India. His previous research focused on the questions of land and housing rights, urban marginality, segregation, urban violence, internal migration, digitalisation, new forms of work and the intersections between governance, citizenship, and participatory planning in Indian cities. He is further exploring creative ways of documenting different dimensions of life in a conflict through collaborative practices of art, poetry, creative writing, visual practices and engaging with different ethnographic explorations. His research engages with the practices that can help build politics of hope to engage with the question of justice in the conflict and post-conflict settings. The aim is to evolve collaborative practices of engagement between state, civil-political society, and survivors of violence in the process of building sustainable futures during the transitional periods. The purpose of his research is to build collaborative-responsive mechanisms to uphold state’s commitment to human rights and transformative-just rule of law based on inclusive decolonial state practices.