Sanjukta Mukherjee

Sanjukta Mukherjee is a professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of transnational feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial theory, critical international development, and urban geographies focused on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. Trained as a geographer and gender studies scholar two broad strands of intellectual inquiry have influenced her work. First, the complex relationships between culture and economy; in particular, neoliberal globalization's intersection with gendered and racialized labor and attendant urban transformation in cities of the global south centered on the politics of class, caste, and age. Second, teaching transnational feminism, research methods, and long-term commitment to collaborative research has fostered her interest in anti-racist, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist pedagogies and methodologies.

Her most recent co-authored book Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India (Oxford University Press, 2019) combines rich ethnographic narratives with institutional and policy analyses to assess the impact of the growth of multinational technology firms on low-wage service workers. It focuses on the lives and livelihoods of housekeepers, drivers, and security guards who often work extremely long hours, at low wages, with no health or pension benefits, and few prospects for social or economic mobility as a result. The book presents these workers' stories of immobility and exclusion but also of their resilience, hope and struggles for survival giving them a long-overdue voice and representation in the research on India's technology boom.

Her new project titled Trans(national) Im(mobilities): Gendering Age, Aging, and Care in India documents and bears testimony to the complex lived experiences of the elderly, attendant notions of care and examines how personal, familial, and institutional perceptions of age reflect the social, economic, and political transformations in urban India. Instead of perceiving older persons as primarily recipients of care, this interdisciplinary project documents how the elderly practice and build dynamic intergenerational care-based relationships with their communities (near and far) that mutually sustain and nourish them.

Courses Taught:

• Women's Lives: Race, Class, & Gender
• Women's Studies in Transnational Contexts
• Special Topics: Understanding Urban Landscapes: Race, Class, & Gender
• Methods and Scholarship in Women’s Studies
• Globalization, Transnationalism, & Gender
• Seminar in Graduate Proposal Writing
• Race, Class and Gender in the City
• Urban Ethnicities

Areas of Interest:

• Transnational Feminisms: Gender and globalization, women and work in the global service economy, transnational aging and care work, diaspora and identity
• Critical Developmental Studies
• Post Colonial Theory
• Urban and Feminist Geographies
• Critical Feminist Pedagogies and Methodologies
• South Asia

Affiliations:

• Department of Geography
• Department of International Studies
• Graduate Program in Sustainable Urban Development
• Interdisciplinary Studies/Masters in Liberal Arts (MALS) Program
• Global Asian Studies Program

External Research Grants:

• 2011-2014: “Servicing Workers: Offshoots of India's Transnational Information Technology Industry”, funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council, (SSHRC) Canada. This collaborative project with Dr. Kiran Mirchandani (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto) and Dr. Shruti Tambe (Pune University, India) examines the predominantly invisible, precarious and informalized labor of auxiliary workers like drivers, security guards and housekeepers who support the hyper-visible, globalized, IT service sector in Pune, India. Three years of fieldwork documenting the lives and livelihoods of auxiliary service workers has exposed the complex and contradictory implications of neoliberal globalization on cities of the global south.

Publications:

Book:

• Mirchandani, Kiran, Sanjukta Mukherjee, and Shruti Tambe. Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Professional Affiliations:

• National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
• Association of American Geographers (AAG)
• International Sociological Association (ISA)