Maitrayee Deka

Before joining Essex, I did my PhD from the Graduate School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan and have spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Milan, working on the research project P2PValue, funded by the European Commission's FP7 program.

My research is in the area of Economic Sociology, STS, Consumer Cultures and Social Theory. I am interested in looking at alternative systems to global capitalism to frame them as a distinct analytical and political category. Part of this interest emerges from examining global bazaar economies as a popular economic system based on my ethnography in Delhi's Electronic Bazaars and developed as a monograph, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, published with Stanford University Press.

I am currently researching the Whitechapel market in East London to investigate bazaars as intellectual places drawing from the literature on public space, and Autonomist Marxism. The other strand of my research focuses on marginal cultural spaces, particularly young adults' social media use in the Global South, to see how they engage with global platforms in unique ways. Overall, I am interested in building a more embedded social theory through observations and practices often ignored in the dominant academic framework.