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Manjusha Nair, Assistant Professor of Sociology, George Mason University
Thursday, November 29, 4pm, ISC 1127

Manjusha Nair's research focuses on the intersection of political sociology and development, with a comparative focus on land and labour politics in India, China, Ethiopia, and South Africa. Her public lecture will discuss her new book-length project on Indian capital flows to Africa. She explores the ground practices that surround the new mineral rush to an "old frontier" by looking at Indian mining firms in Ethiopia and South Africa. Her first book, Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers? Politics in India (SUNY Press, 2016), undertook a study of two different informal workers' movements, one that started in 1977, and became a success, and the other movement that began in 1989 and continues without success. She argues that the first movement succeeded because the workers contended within a labor regime that allowed space for democratic dissent, and the second movement failed because the workers contended within a widely altered labor regime following neoliberal reforms, where these spaces of democratic dissent were pre-empted. Nair received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers University and was Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore (2011-2017). She is also a visiting research affiliate with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand.

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