Nabamita Das
Assistant Professor
About-
In interrogating the hegemonic imperatives of a western disciplinarian sociology, I'm particularly interested in exploring post-colonial experiences of gender, sexuality, class, culture and subjectivity in the context of intimate relations within everyday mundane spaces of adda, friendship, and family. The multiple meanings, practices and negotiations of power in relation to a continually shifting and mutually co-constituting self and other, have made be deeply reflect upon the methodological significance of everyday cultural narratives. In this context, I see sociology as a narrative itself that I seek problematise through simultaneous narratives of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial history and particularly post-colonial feminism.
Qualifications+
BA Sociology (Presidency University, 2005)
MA Sociology (University of Calcutta, 2007)
PhD Sociology (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2013)
Biography+
Research / Administrative Experience+
Negotiating intimate heterosexual identities and relations: narratives of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India
Through interview generated narratives of subjects of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India and other auto-ethnographic narrative texts; this research seeks to examine generation, gender and class specific meanings of intimate heterosexual identities and relations. It focuses on the ways in which subjects negotiate institutionalized heterosexuality or hetero-normativity within everyday practices of intimacy. Subjects’ on-going negotiations that tell stories of multiple and contradictory subjectivities, are analysed to show how personal narratives of intimacy vary across a range of conflicting and competing colonialist, nationalist and trans-nationalist discourses of heterosexuality. Through analysing stories of homosocial intimacy, heterosexual coupling and expressions of intimacy; the research examines the power and vulnerability of ‘doing gender’, illustrates how ‘practices of intimacy’ overlap with ‘family practices’ and demonstrates that expressions of intimacy are socially ordered and linguistically mediated. The research critiques the ‘individualization thesis’ of reflexive modernization by showing how practices of intimacy are socio-culturally embedded within family relations, both real and imagined. By appreciating multiple meanings of power and agency, it also critiques a colonial-modernist notion of linear progress by illustrating the shifting meaning and the mutual co-constitution of the categories of ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’, ‘East’ and ‘West’.
Teaching / Other Experience+
I am currently teaching at both UG and PG level at Presidency University
Previous expererience includes:
Seminar Tutor for the Gender and Sexuality module with Department of POLSIS
Part time lecturer of Sociology with Murulidhar Girls' College, Calcutta, India
Faculty of Sociology with Institute for Civil Service Aspirants, India
Faculty of Sociology with Triumphant Institute of Management Education, India
Post Graduate Supervision+
Academic Memberships+
Publications+
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