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Dr. Nandita Dutta
Institut für Geographie
Universität Osnabrück
Seminarstraße 19 a/b
49074 Osnabrück
Raum: 03/E16
Tel: +49 541 969 4607
Nandita Dutta
Research Associate
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1604 ›Production of Migration‹
Resarch interests: Migration, Gender, Work, Climate Change, Spaces of Migration, South Asia, Ethnography
Nandita Dutta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre ›Production of Migration‹ (SFB 1604) at Osnabrück University. She studies how climate change migration is ‘produced’ by different actors such as international organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations, media and academic researchers (project C5). Through ethnographic work in coastal areas of Eastern India, she aims to understand how various knowledges about climate change and migration are co-created by the local communities and other actors. The broader aim of the Collaborative Research Centre is to develop a reflexive theory of the social production of migration.
She holds a PhD from University College London (UCL) wherein she conducted an ethnography of beauty salons run by first-generation migrant women from South Asia in London. In her doctoral thesis, she unpacked how beauty salons act as sites of diasporic intimacy by investigating dynamics of gender, race, religion and caste in these spaces. She has also researched migrant South Asian garment workers and Information Technology workers in the UK, and beauty workers in France. She holds an MA in Gender Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London where she was a Chevening scholar and a BA in Journalism from University of Mumbai.
Journal articles
Dutta, N., 2023. All in a day’s work: affective labor, disaffection and migrant leisure in a South Asian beauty salon. Journal of Leisure Studies. DOI
Dutta, N., 2022. Drag Queen in the Beauty Salon: What Theorizing Strange Bedfellows Together can tell us about Aunty Work. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. DOI
Dutta, N., 2021. “I Like it Clean”: Brazilian Waxing and Postfeminist Subjectivity Among South Asian Beauticians in London. Frontiers in Sociology, 6.
Other Publications
Dutta, N., 2024. How Caste Smells: Notes From A South Asian Beauty Salon In London. Behanbox. Link
Agarwal, P., Dutta, N. and Soundararajan, V., 2024. Did crying modern slavery in Leicester benefit the workers? Open Democracy. Link
Dutta, N., 2019. F-Rated: Being a Woman Filmmaker in India. New Delhi: HarperCollins India.