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Lecturer in Global Development Politics, University of York

Indrajit Roy focuses on the political sociology of transition in the global South. Indrajit’s monograph The Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Eastern India is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The monograph probes the manner in which the design of public policy shapes poor people’s political negotiations and the ways in which its implementation is shaped in turn by such negotiations.As an ESRC Future Research Leader, Indrajit studies the political ideas, identities and practices of circular labour migrants in India. The empirical focus on labour migration provides him with a window to explore analytical issues pertaining to agrarian change and urban transformations, citizenship and other forms of membership in the political community, public policy based on the assumption of sedentary populations, and cosmopolitanism and modernity.

Indrajit has published with the Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Contemporary South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly and Oxford Development Studies. He is a member of the Effective States Inclusive Development Research programme, based at the University of Manchester. He also contributes to the ESRC/ ERC-funded Democratic Cultures of South Asia research consortium, based at University College London. Indrajit is presently curating a blog series titled ‘Sociology of Citizenship’ for the Politics in Spires/Debating Developments blogs.

In the long term, he proposes to research social and political transformations in a comparative perspective, with a focus on the comparative political sociology of India, Brazil and South Africa.

Indrajit completed his first degree in History from Delhi University, and worked for several years as a development practitioner.

Experience

  • –present
    ESRC Research Fellow, Department of International Development, University of Oxford