Join us for a seminar organised by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, with speaker Dr Papia Sengupta.
Seminar title
Resistance for re-democratisation: Building differential solidarities
Seminar location
Westminster Forum, Fifth Floor
32–38 Wells Street
London W1T 3UW
Seminar speaker
Dr Papia Sengupta
Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Papia is a political scientist and public policy expert who works on the intersectionality between gender, language, education, and urban living in culturally diverse societies. Recently she started working on the politics of knowledge and decoloniality in the Global South and has joined the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield as a British Academy Visiting Fellow.
Her research focuses on India's multicultural politics and turn to majoritarianism. She teaches at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. New Delhi. She held fellowships at Rhodes University South Africa (2015-2018), University of Edinburgh (2016), Brown University (2015), Fribourg University (2013) and the Shastri-Indo Canadian faculty fellowship at Queens University, Kingston (2007). Her first monograph, "Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and Politics", was published in 2018, and she recently published an edited volume "Critical Sites for Inclusion in India's Higher Education". She is the co-applicant in a British Academy project on COVID-19 and its impact on South Asia, and her recent paper on the pandemic and the need for critical communication in urban cities has attracted quite a lot of attention, with being interviewed by The Guardian newspaper. She has published in national and international journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Social Action, Social Change, International Journal of Multilingualism, Geoforum and International Journal on Diversity.
Papia's work on women's rights in India can be found under the Dangerous Women Project of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities at Edinburgh University and her work on women and representation in India and Bangladesh. She is active in community work and regularly talks about academic freedom, federalism in India, education policy and human rights, and women in foreign policy research.
Her project at the Urban Institute, Reclaiming through Resistance, interrogates the marginalization of Muslim women in post-colonial India who have faced negligence from the state and their own community. Muslim women's lives, bodies and clothing have increasingly become the arena of conflict between the state and the patriarchal groups who continue to suppress their identity as individual citizens capable of making their own choices. Deploying the intersectionality approach to urban resistance, the project focuses on Muslim women analyzing the case of the anti-CAA protest in India. The project maps Muslim women's everyday experiences of othering, deprivation and alienation and charts out how state action and policies have created or significantly contributed to these vulnerabilities.
Seminar organiser
Centre for the Study of Democracy
The Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), established in 1989, is based in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster. At the Centre, academics working in politics and international relations undertake socially engaged, methodologically diverse and often interdisciplinary research that addresses a range of critical political challenges concerning democracy worldwide.
CSD has a longstanding international reputation for research excellence through a programme of publications, events and collaborations with academics, practitioners, policymakers, and activists. Research in Politics and International Studies at CSD was ranked 4th highest in the UK for impact in the Research Excellence Framework 2021.
The Centre has established numerous collaborations with scholars and universities around the world and has hosted encounters with public intellectuals, including Luc Boltanski, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty, Quentin Skinner, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Charles Taylor, James Tully, and Michael Walzer. The CR Parekh lecture, instituted by Lord Bhikhu Parekh, has included lectures by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Arundhati Roy, and Ashis Nandy.
CSD recognises that responding to contemporary social and political challenges requires engagement beyond the academy, so it actively welcomes dialogue and collaboration with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and activists worldwide. Professor Nitasha Kaul directs the Centre.
