Skip to main content

Exclusionary Regimes, Autocratization and Democracy

Pooja Kalita

Contact: kalitapooja.2024(at)gmail.com

Post-doctoral Fellow, Social Scientists Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Pooja Kalita hails from the state of Assam situated in the ‘Northeastern’ part of India. She is passionate about researching and sharing the ‘narratives’ of her region from a Global South feminist perspective and her core research areas are – Feminism in South Asia,  Politics of food , Heritage Studies and Visuality in the Social Sciences.  She has an M.phil and PhD from the Department of Sociology (South Asian University New Delhi). Prior to joining the Post-Doctoral fellowship at the CEU DI Forum for ‘Democracy and Development’ at SSA, she has been a Research Fellow with the project – ‘Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia’, funded by Riksbankens Jubilieumsfond (Sweden). She is a visiting fellow at the Colombo Institute, Sri Lanka.  Her work has been published in various edited book volumes, peer-reviewed journals, portals etc. She has presented her work at numerous conferences and workshops in various countries. A recipient of ‘The 2020 Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation (Japan) Grants for Young Researchers from The Northeast’, she often weaves in her passion for story-telling, photography and short film-making with her research interests for wider dissemination. An amateur artist, she also loves to read a lot of fiction.

Research project

A Selective ‘Development’: Food and Gender in times of Contemporary politics in Assam

My research project would look into the relationship of food with the concepts of belongingness, citizenship and democracy in the state of Assam in India. One of the focus areas of my research includes understanding the idea of food democracy from a Global South perspective. Food, which is one of the starkest manifestations of any culture, has always been a contentious issue . Conflicts around food, especially in contemporary India has become a recurrent phenomenon.The manner in which people experience food are impacted by one’s identities based on gender, class, ethnicity, religion etc. Moreover, I am interested in studying the visuality and image-making of women as the provider of ‘good’ food that in turn determines her eligibility to be qualified as a ‘good’ woman and a citizen.