anindita

Presently, I am enrolled at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai as a Doctoral candidate (Ph.D. 2017-20), and am working on the topic ‘State, Citizen, and the Other─ Migrants in Assam’. The research delves into grasp the constructions of citizens and its delineations in the light of the persisting and pre-existing population mobility from Bangladesh to India and the migrant population residing in the two valleys of the North-East Indian state of Assam (Barak and Brahmaputra). I have extensively engaged in the ethnographic understanding of the notion of governmentality to understand how it is practiced by the state, implemented at multiple levels on one hand; and how these pertain to the constructions of citizenship in everyday life. Therefore, doctoral research concerns with the immigration question in the North East Indian state of Assam, and questions the very discourse of the identity of the migrant-other in relation to the legitimate citizen. In doing so, I am aiming for disruption of the legal conceptions of citizenship and constitutional definitions of it, and moving towards unraveling the lived experiences of individuals, caught in the dilemma of this delineation and constructions of legitimacy.

Prior to moving onto my doctoral research, I pursued my pre-doctoral research (M.Phil., 2017) from TISS, Mumbai on the topic ‘Undocumented Bangladeshi Migrants─ A Study in West Bengal’, through which I aimed to unravel the migrant identity as a politico-religious category that is shaped by historical impulses over the decades following the partition of India. It oriented me towards my current doctoral endeavor and shaped my contextual and theoretical familiarity with the area of research. My Master’s degree in Sociology, which I pursued from the University of Pune, culminating into a thesis on ‘Cultural Diversity and Regional Identities among Indian Diasporas in Goettingen, Germany’ nurtured me for my present academic engagement.

I have presented papers in many conferences and participated in workshops in India, Indonesia, and Nepal. Though I have not engaged in health as a core area of expertise, the themes emerging from my field-works in West Bengal and Assam hint areas that need further attention, such as, health systems and how access to health care is determined by religio-political identities of the migrant-other. Migration in the South-Asian context had so far been my forte and I plan to work coherently with the health paradigm in migration research to unravel the social determinants of health care access, taking into consideration the importance of subjectivities.