Encountering Difference: Intimacy, Conviviality and Youth in Urban India
This research uses intimacy as an analytical lens to examine practices of conviviality in multicultural urban settings in both India and the UK, examining arts, music, and educational spaces as key sites where these relationships are formed and enacted. It explores how young people negotiate and build connections across difference through everyday forms of friendship, solidarity, and care. Intimacy is defined in an expanded sense, not limited to romantic or familial relationships, but as a broader relational field that includes friendship, collaboration, proximity, and everyday forms of connection. This allows the research to examine how people relate across differences in subtle and often unspoken ways, including friendships maintained without public acknowledgement, collaborative relationships where difference is present but not explicitly discussed, and everyday moments where boundaries are temporarily suspended. These forms of intimacy are often partial and contingent. The project understands conviviality as ordinary, effortful, and often ambivalent work -- attending not only to how young people come together across difference, but to the ways such encounters can also be unsettling.
The project foregrounds sensory ethnography and participatory methods, including filmmaking, workshops, and soundscapes, working directly with young people to document their shared experiences of urban life and sense of belonging across difference. It contributes to anthropological debates on urban diversity, conviviality, and everyday coexistence, combining ethnography, sensory methods, and collaborative filmmaking.