Srishtee largely works within the ambit of Borderlands and Migration and has completed her PhD research on the same from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. As a Sociologist she is interested in the lifeworlds of borderland communities and how ‘border management’ encompasses their aspirations. Additionally, she aims to explore which specific legacies of Partition continue to affect the community as well as understand cross-border migrant emplacement within the intertwined networks of political and cultural power. Read our Q&A with Srishtee!
Prior to the present position Srishtee was an Assistant Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai where she was teaching and mentoring research for Master’s students. At Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie – a civil service training institute, she completed a monograph for IAS officers to be posted at border districts of India.
During her PhD she was a CSDS fellow and an Erasmus plus fellow at the University of Tampere, Finland conducting doctoral research with Pakistani-Hindu refugees at the western frontiers of India and Pakistan. She undertook multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, Rajasthan and Lahore, Pakistan. She has steered independent and collaborative research for initiating small-town narratives on Partition beginning in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.
During the fellowship, Srishtee aims to understand how ‘borderlanders’ perceive the frontiers as well as the, often abstract concepts of state power and the nation. What remains of the ‘idea of home’, notions of ‘undivided homeland’ and liminal landscapes of Partition 1947. Srishtee will be mentored by Professor Jennifer Leaning
