Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Mike Douglass, Asia Research Institute and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Jennifer Robinson has suggested that “… within urban studies … there remains an urgent need to develop effective ways to escape and contest power relations and exclusions of the colonial present of our theorizations and practices of knowledge-building” (2013:4). In the first part of this paper, I outline what this statement implies in epistemic terms and suggest a need to decolonize social theory in order to capture contemporary processes that organize social life. In the second part of the paper, I carry this discussion forward through an analysis of the way work and labour is organized for the poor in India, who are part of the system of petty production. Using field level data from a study that I recently completed, I discuss the nature and scope of petty production and indicate how this system organises the sociabilities that structure the networks of individuals and households across rural and urban India to create connected regional networked social spaces. I indicate how the experience of work and labour of individuals within households crisscrosses the territoriality that organizes the discussions of binaries such as city/village, urban/rural, industrial/agrarian in social theory. In the conclusion, I suggest that decolonialisation of theory is vital to reconstruct new paradigms that highlight connected experiences of contemporary sociabilities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sujata Patel is Professor of Sociology at University of Hyderabad in India. She received her BA and MA in Sociology from University of Bombay, India, and another MA in Sociology from Dalhousie University, Canada. She also received her PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. A historical sensibility and a combination of four perspectives–marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post structuralism/post colonialism influences her work which covers diverse areas such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, cityformation, social movements, gender construction, reservation, quota politics and caste and class formations in India. She is the Series Editor of Routledge India Originals: Cities and the Urban Imperative.

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