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STATEMENT OF INTERESTS
The bulk of my research and writing on South Asian communities in Tanzania (1991-2000) focuses on mutually constitutive relationships among social spaces, identities, resistance, and change. This work examines how interplay of religion and caste-based organizations, everyday places, and contending public discourses intersects with rapidly shifting sociopolitical realities at the local, national and transnational scales to shape people's identities, interests and alliances, as well as their sexual practices and privileges. I highlight how mutually constitutive relationships between social spaces and difference equip disenfranchised groups with the most accessible sites to confront established norms. At the same time, I discuss how people's embeddedness in multiple relational webs stifles their ability to challenge existing hierarchies.
My scholarship since 2000 deploys these insights to understand the sociopolitical processes and practices associated with globalization, development and empowerment, while also arguing for a need to generate new forms of collaborations and research agendas that can advance transnational feminist praxis and socially relevant dialogues across North/South borders. With rural women’s grassroots activism and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India as a primary focus, my research and collaborative writing critically analyze popular narratives of “globalization from below” and “global feminisms” in conjunction with professionalization of NGOs and the mainstreaming of gender and empowerment discourses, and discuss how these interlinked processes mold the visions, strategies and meanings of social protest and political transformation in the activist communities of the "global South." Another concern has focused on extending “intersectionality,” a concept widely used in feminist studies to examine various axes of difference (race, class, gender, etc.) as interlocking social categories and identities. I argue for a need to reconceptualize intersectional difference as constituted in relation to place-specific struggles over rights, resources, social practices and relationships—including sexual and emotional intimacies. Along with this reconceptualization, I strive to advance the concepts of reflexivity and positionality in feminist social sciences with an explicit aim of recasting dominant definitions of academic research. In the absence of enduring connections with specific sociopolitical struggles, and of spaces for critical dialogues with those whose interests progressive research seeks to serve, the ‘sole-conceptualized’ and ‘sole-authored’ model of research will likely have little use-value for those who live in the fields of the academics and NGO-workers. Challenging normative definitions of knowledge and knowledge producers inevitably entails reshaping—through critical reflexivity—meanings that are embedded in different sociopolitical contexts, languages, and institutional cultures; as well as meanings that emerge, get stifled or realign themselves in the course of specific struggles.
Finally, my engagements with “collaboration” seek to dispel the notion that collaborative knowledge production is a mere methodology. All knowledge grows out of and is embodied in dialogue, and the collaborative process can serve as the medium through which varied knowledges evolving in specific places and institutions interact with one another to produce new forms of knowledge. Through transborder alliances, transnational comparative frameworks, and bilingual writing, my co-authors and I underscore a need to develop theories and praxes of collaboration that are both place-specific and able to cross sociocultural, geographical and institutional borders to generate intellectual and political dialogues that can gain simultaneous resonance and relevance in multiple sites. My ongoing work as a part of the Sangtin Collective in Uttar Pradesh exemplifies that committed collaboration can become a key piece of each collaborator’s individual and collective agency, while serving the reflexive activism and struggles for sociopolitical justice out of which the collective journey evolved.