Biography

Dr. Poushali Basak is Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School. Dr. Basak is a feminist, queer scholar-activist specialising in the historiography of feminist and queer collectives and movements. Her academic interests have been in the areas of the political and the urban; right to the city; gender and citizenship; queer lives, politics, and live-abilities; gender and education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar being trained in the disciplines of Women’s Studies, Urban Studies and English Literature. Her M.A. dissertation traced the place making of Rajarhat, Kolkata and her MPhil work focused on history of sex-workers’ organising, negotiating developmental governance.

Poushali has obtained PhD from Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, on the affective histories of autonomous women’s collectives in India since 1980s. By revisiting the micro-histories of feminist and allied movements, collectives she has brought in critical insights about political collectives, feminist and queer communities, asking difficult questions around feminist sisterhood, friendships, comradeships, differences, departures, exhaustion. Some of her ongoing research and publication focusses on radical imaginations of feminist-queer collectives, questions of citizenship and reclaiming the public in the genealogy of feminist movements.

Poushali has worked with Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, Max Weber Stiftung, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bebaak Collective and Sappho for Equality in research and program management capacities. Being associated with different feminist, queer and human rights organisations, her endeavour has been to bridge the gaps between academic knowledge building and organisations working with communities. Through such collaborative approaches of knowledge building, she brings care and criticality in research, pedagogies and teaching-learning processes within and beyond classrooms. As a third-world scholar-activist, Poushali’s academic work is very much located in the struggles of marginalised queer-trans communities and inspired by local movements and collective processes. Thus, building academic research and pedagogies rooted in the everyday lives and politics of the oppressed, yet speaking to diverse population coming from different societal backgrounds and privileges have been the ongoing contestations in her academic pursuits.