Department of Development Studies
Dr Rasika Ajotikar
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- Department of Development Studies British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
- Department
- Department of Development Studies
- Qualifications
- BA Philosophy (University of Pune, India), MA Anthropology (University of Pune, India), Sangeet Visharad in North India Classical vocal music (Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, India), PhD (SOAS)
- Email address
- ra62@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Rasika Ajotikar is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2024) at the Department of Development Studies at SOAS. She received a doctorate in ethnomusicology from SOAS in 2019. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of contemporary performance cultures in an Ambedkarite and anti-caste movement in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. In partiuclar, she examined Dalit (formerly untouchable) women's performance spheres against the backdrop of the changing class, caste and gender dynamics in modern western India. From 2017 to 2020, Rasika worked as a postdoctoral fellow on a DFG (German Research Foundation) project at the department of Musicology in Göttingen, Germany in collaboration with the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv. It involved digitisation, cataloguing and analysing a private sound archive of Indian performance traditions recorded in the Netherlands and India between 1963 and 2005 . Rasika was also a teaching fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Göttingen, Germany in 2020. Her current project as part of the British Academy Postdoctoral fellowship broadly looks at culture, labour and hereditary musicianship.
