Dr. Papia Sengupta

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 Global South. She joins the Urban Institute 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 in 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 need for critical communication in urban cities have 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 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 on issues of academic freedom, federalism in India, education policy and human rights, 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, body 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 charting out how state action and policies have created or significantly contributed to these vulnerabilities.