The Centre de Sciences Humaines is pleased to invite you to the CSH Seminar on:
Caste and Emancipatory Quest: Ethnography of Dalit Lives in an Urban Neighborhood
Speaker: Rama DEVI (CSH Delhi)
Discussant: Ashwini K Swain (Sustainable Futures Collaborative, CSH)
To register: Please fill out the registration FORM
CSH Seminars are in hybrid mode. Please pre-register for offline and online registration before Monday, 8 September, 2:00 p.m. IST.
About the Talk:
Caste and Emancipatory Quest examines the entangled interaction between caste and city and how it (re)produces various forms of urban stratification. The fate of caste has been vehemently discussed and debated in post-independence modern India, often culminating in the spatial dichotomization of the identity. While rural areas emerged as a natural site for caste to exist and thrive, its presence in urban areas gained scant attention. Urban, representing the modern space and ethos, came to be envisioned as a site detached from oppressive structures and relations.
Based on a qualitative study of a predominantly Dalit neighbourhood in Delhi, the book examines the emancipatory promise of urban. It offers an ethnographic account of various aspects of Dalit lives, including neighbourhood relations, intergenerational mobility, and politics, to foreground how caste exerts influence on their everyday interactions, experiences, opportunities, and economic mobility in the city. It argues that urban represents a liminal space while offering promising opportunities to aspire and achieve upward mobility; it presents structural constraints frustrating the march of Dalits to claim desired mobility.
About the Speaker
Rama Devi is a post-doctoral fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. Before joining CSH, she was an adjunct faculty member at KREA University. She completed her doctorate in Sociology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Her research interests broadly lie in the domains of social stratification, discrimination, exclusion, and inequality, and urban sociology. Her published writings engage with youth aspirations, the contemporary labour market segregation, higher education, and affirmative policy under the neo-liberal economy.
