Lecture | CADS Research Seminar
Kinship Under Colonial Duress: Anticolonial Nationalism Mends Ruptured Tibetan Attachments
- Date
- Thursday 10 September 2026
- Time
- Series
- CADS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Agora
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 0B.23
What does it mean to grow up without your family, exiled by empire? China's colonial invasion and continued occupation of Tibet violently ruptured family relations and attachments to homeland. In response, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama established a residential school system in India for Tibetan refugee children — but exile reshaped Tibetan kinship itself, producing generations of semi-orphans raised apart from their parents.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among former students of these schools, Dawa Lokyitsang traces how this rupture became the ground for something unexpected: creative peer-based kinship networks, bound by shared national and personal loss, and by shared aspirations for an anticolonial future. Her broader work follows Tibetans' decolonizing practices at the intersection of developing Asian settler colonialisms, reactive anticolonial nationalisms, and creative Indigenous sovereign futurisms. This talk asks how mutuality and chosen kinship become tools for mending what empire tears apart.
A story of rupture, creativity, and refusal
About Dawa Lokyitsang
Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder, where her dissertation, Radical Compassion: Kinship, Education, and Care in the Tibetan Exile Community, drew on archival research and oral histories spanning three generations of Tibetan exiles and examined how Tibetan refugee schools in India reconstitute communal worlds through practices of care, kinship, and Tibetan education under conditions of colonial dispossession and displacement. Her current book project, Resurgent Tibetan Otherwise Worlds, builds on this research, tracing how former students carry school-based practices of care, kinship, and education into acts of anticolonial resistance and ethical worldmaking in the global diaspora — reframing Tibetan survival not as passive endurance but as an insurgent form of relational sovereignty, in conversation with Black and Indigenous radical thought.
Her research sits at the intersection of Anthropology of Empire and Settler Colonialism, Native and Indigenous Studies, Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of the Himalayas, Made in China Journal, and Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care (Rutgers University Press), with forthcoming work in the Journal of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and The Tibet Reader (Duke University Press). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and she will join the Center for Messianic Studies at the University of Würzburg as a fellow, where her project Charismatic Sovereignty examines the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s devolution of political power and contested succession as generative acts of refusal that produce new possibilities for Tibetan sovereignty in exile. Her work reframes Tibetan communities not only as subjects of Chinese state policy but as active theorists of indigeneity, sovereignty, and decolonization across the Himalayas and beyond.