Overview
Gurgaon, India's Millennium City, promises many opportunities - but, for women, it also poses specific challenges. Through women's personal narratives, the film explores their experiences of living and working in Gurgaon and illuminates the gendered nature of urban Indian life. Gender and violence are intrinsically linked. Urbanisation of traditional societies and the influx of working women and men from 'outside' are changing the gender dynamics of our cities. In this film, we work with women's voices to probe the overt and covert structures of control and the indomitable struggle for agency and selfhood.
The documentary was directed by Dr Rangan Chakravarty, a Kolkata-based media producer and director. It was produced as part of an ESRC-funded project (2020-24) titled (Principal Investigator, Professor Manali Desai). Dr Garima Jaju, Dr Shannon Philip and Prof Nandini Gooptu (Co-Investigator) were directly involved in the making of this film.
Speakers
Manali Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her work encompasses the areas of ethnic and gendered violence, state formation, crisis, and post-colonial transformation. She was PI of the ESRC project, Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa (2020-24).
Shannon Philip is Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on masculinities, femininities and sexualities in postcolonial Global South contexts. Shannon has done extensive fieldwork in India and South Africa exploring themes of gendered violence, urbanisation, sexuality, intimacies and gendered relations at the intersections of race, class and caste. His first book is entitled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony published by Cambridge University Press (2022).
Garima Jaju is a Smuts Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow at 鶹ӾCollege. A scholar of labour, kinship and urban life in contemporary India, she received her PhD from the University of Oxford. Her research has been published in or is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthological Institute, Modern Asian Studies, among others.
Details
This event is open to all and free to attend with no need to book. It will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) only.
There will be refreshments available.
Access
This event will take place in the Roger Needham Room on the second floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.
Humanities at Wolfson
This event is jointly organised by Wolfson's Humanities Society and the Research Networks office.
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics which take place every Tuesday during term time - please sign up to their to keep up to date with their upcoming events.
