Dr K Ravi Raman

My early fieldwork explored the history and political economy of the plantation life-world in the Indian south. I am currently integrating work done at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester(Hallsworth Research Fellow 2005-08), the Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford (Charles Wallace Fellowship,1999) and at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, India.

Inspired by structuralist and post-structuralist critical perspectives, my more recent work centres around the multiple histories of power, material relations and the “regime(s) of truth” as related to the indigenous people and the other historically oppressed dalit and backward communities in India. It has been my attempt to interrogate globalisation and the political economy of development, agrarian and the labour questions including the commodity chain trap, state and state-effects, organisation studies and corporate social responsibility, migration and regional development, natural resources, environment and post-development social movement, as also the implications of the entry of multilateral financial agencies on sustainable development and social democratic regimes. I have now been concentrating on the innumerable forms of 'contra-discourse’ that the victims and the oppressed articulate, as part of their resistance identity and social formation.

Method of Enquiry: Interdisciplinary with a focus on political economy, development studies and historical anthropology which in turn has helped me develop a critical dialogue with the historiographic traditions such as the Subaltern Studies and the World System analysis as in my authored book.

Regional Expertise: South Asia/India/Kerala