Faculty News

JESSE KNUTSON

Jesse was a visiting professor in the month of June in the department of Civilizations of Asia and Africa at Sapienza: Università di Roma in the department of Civilizations of Asia and Africa. He also lectured at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in May before heading to Rome. Four of Jesse’s latest research articles are in production, being published in various Festschrifts and edited volumes. His latest book manuscript, which interlaces case studies from across the entire history of Sanskrit poetry, and the political history inseparable from it, is under consideration with a major publisher. Finally, he is hard at work editing the Bloomsbury Cultural History of South Asian Literature vol. 1: Antiquity.  

PALLAVI GUPTA

In 2024, Pallavi Gupta published an article “Temporal geographies of premature death: Caste, law, and infrastructure in Swachh Bharat” in Political Geography. Based on her research, Gupta highlights the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and infrastructure that enables premature deaths of sewage and manual cleaning workers.

Abstract

Why do sewage and manual cleaning workers, who mostly belong to Dalit communities, die prematurely? In answering this question, I argue that the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and infrastructure enables their premature deaths. The gaps in law and those in urban sanitation infrastructure in India, combined with deeply entrenched Caste ethos, and the commodification of cleanliness, create conditions where the deaths of sewage workers are a regular occurrence. I situate deaths of sewage workers within the Clean India Campaign, a government program for clean public infrastructure and managing fecal matter to posit that the relentless pursuit of cleanliness results in its commodification, which in turn exacerbates the exploitation of the sewage cleaning workers. 

Using a theoretical lens drawn from Black studies and Dalit-Bahujan scholarship, I demonstrate that the temporality of law and infrastructure makes the cleaning workers invisible to the planners and implementers of the Clean India Campaign. Under such conditions, the cleaning workers gain recognition from law only when they die. Their appalling working conditions and the near absence of workplace protections hardly get any attention. It is only when they die that the law recognizes their personhood. I draw attention to how law and infrastructure influence each other and contribute to Black Studies and Dalit Studies by framing caste as racializing assemblages—contextualizing the temporal geographies of premature death and the role of infrastructures as an assemblage.

You can access the article here: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629824001070

In 2023, Pallavi Gupta published an article based on her research, “Geographies of Waiting: Politics, Methods, and Praxis. A case study of Indian Railways.” in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(9), 2068-2083.

You can access her article here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2023.2209140

Abstract

Waiting is spatial, gendered, and hidden. Drawing on ethnographic field work with cleaners in railway facilities of Hyderabad, India, and building on infrastructure and mobilities studies, I theorize the space-time of waiting. I propose waiting as a multivalent lens through which to view power, space, and labor relations. Second, I argue that waiting is a method offering possibilities for understanding the Sisyphean task of cleaning and uneven, precarious, and diverse urban worlds. Waiting is integral to maintenance work, and pivotal to the production of “clean” infrastructures, yet it remains invisible. Third, I posit waiting as praxis: a mode of field work grappling with place-based realities. Waiting is learning the station. My article considers the social and economic (im)mobilities that underpin the waiting of cleaning workers. I further posit queues as microinfrastructures of waiting. Finally, I argue that waiting, when employed as a method, and as praxis, reveals the uneven urban worlds, relational spaces, and the everydayness of capitalism.