Prof Saraswati Raju - RMAP Visiting Fellow

I am pleased for this opportunity to introduce myself to the RMAP Blog community. I am Professor in Social Geography in India’s premier institution– Jawaharlal Nehru University, named after the first prime minister of independent India. I remember the day I had joined the Centre for the Study of Regional Development in the University most vividly as if the event has taken place only yesterday.

My main interest in terms of academic engagement with teaching and research is in gendered geographies in the spheres of labour market and social development, particularly literacy, education and skills, and social space.

I attribute my interest in geography of gender to my years as post-doctoral fellow in Syracuse University in USA and to my supervisor Prof. David Sopher whose academic engagement with social disparities helped me pursue my own interest in socially (and economically) disadvantaged segments of Indian society. I could see that the gendered position of women cut across almost all other categories of differentiation and there was a definite geography of gender emerging in the Indian social space. This was also the time when gender concerns in geography had started to take shape the world over and the Gender and Geography Study Group within the International Geographic Union (IGU) was formed to which I was subsequently invited to join. As far as I am concerned, my initiation into geography of gender was because of one of those moments when I was at the right place at the right time.

In later years, my joining Jawaharlal Nehru University, which is known for its liberal and multidisciplinary orientation and leftist ideology concerned with cutting edge issues of class and caste has made it possible for me to continue with my gendered analyses in an androcentric subject such as geography.

At one level I do belong to the so-called ‘privileged few’ who do move ‘in-and-out’ of contested boundaries in the sense of getting exposed to knowledge produced elsewhere and yet my discourses remain limited by my southern location. However, now I realized how my situatedness in a southern middle class milieu and growing up amidst day-to-day realities of caste/tribal, class, rural and urban struggles has equipped me to engage in much nuanced, complex and multilayered discourses on gender and thus question some of the established academic orders, such as outlined in my 2004 paper on ‘Teaching and Researching the Geography of Gender’. I also realized that gendered discourses are mediated through inescapable economic, social and political institutions both for women and men. In a way, the real life complexities informed my teaching and research, demonstrated by such publications as: We are Different, but can We Talk?, Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation and Production of Knowledge: Looking for ‘Theory’ in ‘Familiar’ Places?

I have used available spaces in development, and demographic studies to bring forth the centrality of gendered locations in deprivation and marginality issues to bring in gender in geography and now it is becoming increasingly possible to confront and seek to transform gender-blind theories and analyses therein in an incrementally pragmatic way. In retrospect, this was as much a strategy as my conviction that this was the way in which geography of gender needed to be handled in the Indian context. Thus, much of my teaching and researching on gender has been a constant struggle to be critically aware that women and men are not undifferentiated monolithic categories and that even as gendered construction continues to remain the central analytical category, such a construction has to be socio-spatially contextualized.

My latest publications include: NGOs and the State in the Twenty-First Century: Ghana and India and Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of India

I welcome discussions both via this blog post and face-to-face and can be found in Room 5018 in the RMAP corridor. I will be presenting a seminar in the RMAP Research Seminar Series which you are most welcome to attend.

This assemblage of photos indicates some adventures I have had and important things in my life. The background features the Pyramid of the Sun in the famous Teotihuacan city in Mexico which I scaled in 2005. The top left insert is of the winter carnival in Ottawa, Canada in 2005. Top right insert is the Deepawali (Festival of Lights) arrangement I made at home and the bottom insert is of my garden in Delhi.