Gopika Solanki has been awarded a Carleton University 2024-25 Research Development Grant for her project Negotiating Difference in Relational Spaces: Ethnicity, Gender, and Interreligious Marriage in India.
Multi-ethnic and multi-religious postcolonial societies witness ongoing contestations over the regulation of inter-religious love and marriage since these threaten exclusionary and hyper-nationalist ethnopolitical orders. Using spatial lenses, the proposed research aims to advance a theoretical understanding of the politics of everyday navigation of difference by examining interreligious marriage and romance in public and private spaces. Using ethnography, this study seeks to identify how interreligious intimacies affect the construction, maintenance, and navigation of sexual, gender, kinship, ethnic, political, and religious identities over time, and generate recommendations to construct inclusive social spaces and foster interethnic ties.