Atreyee Sen
Email: atreyee.sen@manchester.ac.uk
My areas of research interest are gender, conflict, women’s militancy, child-soldiering, urban anthropology and religious fundamentalism; my regional focus is South Asia. My doctoral dissertation (which won the 2002 Sutasoma Award for outstanding research from the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Association of Social Anthropologists) focused on the experiences of poor right-wing women and children in the Bombay slums, and their engagement with violent political projects in western India. It has recently been published as Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum, Hurst and Co, London, 2007.
I am currently working on two research projects. The first explores the survival strategies of Muslim children displaced by communal riots in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. The second project focuses on experiences of police torture, cultures of confinement and reconstruction of life among extreme left-wing activists in Calcutta (in eastern India) over the last three decades. At the University of Manchester, I am involved in teaching courses related to war and conflict, ethno-nationalism and minorities, gender and sexuality and South Asia.
To contribute towards RICC’s research outlook, I will explore the ways in which right-wing, radicalised women and children can dismantleurban multi-ethnic relations and multinational projects. My research raises questions that confront the tensions of the concept. For example, what does ‘cosmopolitanism’ mean for marginalised, impoverished slum- dwellers at the fringes of global cities? Why does the presence and influx of regional migrants, religious ‘others’ and supra-corporations affect the nature of street and slum hostilities? How does the cosmopolitan city ‘out there’ determine community boundaries, transform identity constructs and breed intolerance? Given these various paradoxes and ambiguities, my work focuses on the ways in which perspectives in urban anthropology can impact upon the debate surrounding ‘cosmopolitanism’.