Amrita DasGupta

A fully funded Doctoral Candidate (SOAS Research Studentship 2020) at the Department of Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, researches on transnational migration, borders, sex work, climate crisis and gender in the lower deltaic Bengal. Her PhD deals with Indo-Bangladesh water-borders and trafficking in humans. It shifts focus to the aqua-centricism and tyrannies of cartographies in the Sundarbans: her experience of being a second generation partition survivor living the tales of migration on foot from seventy-five years ago (c. 1947 Partition) of her ancestors through the (now) Indo-Bangladesh Border, and eight months long field work in the Bengal Mangroves exposed her to the riverine geographies of Bengal, the the socio-economic prejudices and religious apertures it fosters.

After an undergrad and postgrad degree in English Literature she acquired an M.Phil degree in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University, India in 2018. Her research interests also include Postcolonial Studies, and Environmental Humanities with regards to South Asia.

She completed her M.Phil titled ‘Bonbibi’s Sundarbans: Tiger Widows and Water-Prostitues’ (2018). It interrogated the impact of/relation between animal-attack widows and the changing norms of widowhood in relation to sex work in the Sundarbans—World’s only Mangrove Tiger Land.

Thenceforth, she worked as a Project Assistant on the project named, ‘Transformation Towards Sustainability in Higher Education: Interactional Dynamics in Gender and Intersectionality’ with a consortium of partners including Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Here she researched on the the position of educational policies in India within the gamut of the sustainable development goals, the function and practicality of such goals in relation to Higher education and its effects on intersectionality.

• Postcolonial Studies
• Environmental Humanities
• Transnational Migration
• Climate Crisis, Borders
• Sex Work
• Trafficking in Humans