Event details

In July of this year, a so-called “Gen Z” protest movement erupted in New Delhi, with solidarity protests in key cities around the country and globally. Relatively rare within the current BJP dominated political context, the protests have highlighted the social category of youth and generation as key faultlines within contemporary India. Moving beyond the label “Gen Z”, Ritty Lukose argues that understanding the concept of generation through a conjunctural frame draws out how the shifting trajectories of more than three decades of liberalization have transformed structures of aspiration and the labor of social reproduction. These dynamics resonate differently across the intersecting dynamics of caste, class, religion and gender, yet together they highlight education as a key site for the politicization of aspirational futures.

Ritty Lukose is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies and South Asian Studies at the Gallatin School at New York University. She is the author of Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Duke, 2009) and co-edited a book, South Asian Feminisms (Duke, 2012). A co-edited book with Tejaswini Niranjana is forthcoming entitled Digital Intimacy: Young Women, Gendered Modernities and Aspirations in Inter-Asia (Routledge, 2026). She has published book chapters and articles in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Social History, Social Analysis, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Recent publications include “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era” in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, “South Asia” in The Routledge Global History of Feminism and “The Great Indian Kitchen: Taste, Distaste, Feminism and Women’s Emancipation” in Verge: Studies in Global Asias”.