Stephen Graf is a Politics Ph.D. candidate at the New School for Social Research studying the organizational forms of students acting together. Having initially studied the connections between language, whiteness, and everyday performances of self, he then spent nearly a decade working for an inter-governmental organization’s UN observer mission in New York City. His current work builds on both of these experiences to explore how students recursively construct, break down, and blur the relations between state and society. Stephen received a Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to do research in Delhi and Hyderabad, India, on Leftist and Ambedkarite student networks across both cities.

Stephen’s research asks the question, with seemingly no end in sight to the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, how have progressive factions among the youth been able to not only continue winning university student union elections but also assert themselves as one of the few remaining oppositional forces to majoritarianism in the country today? Given that most conceptualizations of the structure and actions of political parties are based on Euro-American contexts, this project explores how the singularities of the Indian political system as seen through the lens of student politics might provide a more nuanced understanding of the shape of party-society relations throughout the Global South.

At GIDEST, Stephen will build on the observational, archival, and interview-based methods used during his preliminary research period to explore the following themes: order/disorder and their relation to security apparatuses, organizational autonomy and isomorphism across institutions, the im/possibilities of transnational student coalition building, and the inter-connected effects of white and Brahminical supremacies on present day Indian and global politics.