Richa Nagar
Biographic Data
| ID | 186635 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richa Nagar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richa |
| FAMILY NAME | Nagar |
| SIGNATURE | NAGAR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3629-8622 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 438 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Beyond Methodology: Hungry Translation as a Yearning for Justice
This essay emerges from an invited lecture that I delivered at the University of Amsterdam in 2024. My reflections include glimpses from three decades of journeying within and across diverse sites of knowledge-making: a farmers’ and workers’ movement, a theatre group and my classrooms. I ask: how do we move from the idea of remaking research to a transformational praxis through which we can co-create shared hungers for justice that refuse the bor…
Epistemic Agitations and Pedagogies for Justice: A Conversation around Hungry Translations: Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability
This forum began as an "Author Meets Critics" at the 2019 NWSA Conference in San Francisco, where seven feminist scholar-activists from diverse locations, disciplines, and trajectories came together to discuss their unique co-journeys while exploring the daring theoretical interventions in Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (HT). HT is an insightful and inspiring text authored by Richa Nagar through journeys w…
Revisiting the epistemic terrains of gender, sex, and empowerment through four sites of engagement in India: Introducing a conversation
Knowledges that claim to end oppression and marginalization frequently end up feeding the same hierarchies that produce those oppressions. In the academy and in the development industry, it is not uncommon for ‘local’ or ‘subaltern’ knowledges to be positioned as ‘raw data’ to be utilised by the formally certified intellectual or expert, and even presented sometimes as obstacles to development goals that may have been imported from elsewhere . Th…
Gender, caste and movement: Lessons from Sangtin Yatra
This essay draws on ongoing translations of, and reflections on, journeys undertaken since 2002 with members of Sangtin in Uttar Pradesh. Sangtin, originally imagined as an NGO, has steadily evolved into Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), a largely women-led movement of 8000 small farmers and laborers, most of them identifying as Dalit. SKMS emerged from encounters with NGOs, academics, and artists whose fixed understandings of ‘feminism’ of…
Feminist Interventions: Voices from the South
This entry surveys feminist interventions under way across three major continents and demonstrates their lasting impacts on regional and urban development studies. Chalo Nagpur of South Asia, indigenous resistance of Latin America, and Feminist Africa together interrogate the monolingualism of academic feminisms, and complicate how we come to know the proverbial “Global South” amid the privileged locations of the “Global North.”
Performing Embodied Translations: Decolonizing Methodologies of Knowing and Being
This performance and transcript emerge from a collaborative journey that grapples with what it might mean to agitate dominant pedagogical and methodological conventions of Eurocentric Angophone academia. Together, we perform an argument and a search: for multiple entry points into decolonizing feminisms; for multiple modes of knowing and being that can interrupt and challenge the epistemes that are rooted in thoughts and practices of colonialism …
Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability
About the struggles of thousands Dalit women, laborers and peasants of Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh under Sangatina; includes not only the words and reflections of many saathis of Sangtin, but also the everyday stories of their struggles, poems by Richa Nagar and a play
Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability
The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning fro…
Reflexivity, Positionality, and Languages of Collaboration in Feminist Fieldwork
This chapter is organized as follows. Part 1 is an abridged and revised version of a longer piece originally written with Susan Geiger between 1997 and 2001. Part 2 is a revised version of an article that first emerged in 2001–2; it deployed the arguments made with Geiger to interpret the responses of three different feminist audiences to a manuscript that the author submitted to the journal, Gender, Place and Culture . Part 3 is a revised versio…
Dar es Salaam
This chapter discusses the manner in which the author's own gendered, racialized, and communally marked body was read by different Tanzanian Asian communities in various social sites in the city of Dar es Salaam, and how these encounters shaped the knowledge she was able to produce about Asian communal politics in that city in the early 1990s. The second part of the chapter turns to questions of reciprocity, power, trust, and ethical engagement i…
Traveling and Crossing, Dreaming and Becoming: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism
This chapter is based on writing that the author undertook with members of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Hindi and English between 2004 and 2012, as well as on her own reflections on that writing. It traces the beginnings of the creative journey with sangtins that led to the making of the collaborative book Sangtin Yatra (Anupamlata et al. 2004, Sangtin Lekhak Samooh 2012), and analyzes the political battles that emerged from this ya…
Muddying the waters: Coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism
This book forum extends a discussion that Laura Pulido first organized around Richa Nagar’s Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism at the 2015 Annual Meeting of
Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation
This conversation with Richa Nagar about feminist friendships and co-authorships emerged from a collaborative interview as a way to resist individualism, career-centric-orientations and academic-stardom; themes that are prominent in the interview itself. The conversation explores the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement, based on Ric…
Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism
This book uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform the discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation, and genre blending in research and…
Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: Reflections from a journey
If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their ow…
Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis
Churnings of a movement: Sangtin's diary
This essay considers the relationships among silence, insight, violence, and possibilities in the context of movement making. It works through stories and vignettes associated with the lives of those who constitute a growing movement of peasants and laborers in the Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh to explore the power of affect in shaping a political struggle. In so doing, the essay grapples with some difficult questions: what kinds of silences …
Reflexivity and Positionality in Feminist Fieldwork Revisited
Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles by Laura Pulido. Race, Radical Activism, and the Third World Left
Laura Pulido , Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles Why is it that Proposition 187, ostensibly targeting all undocumented persons in California, was seen by the public as a referendum on the Latinoization of California? The answer, according to Laura Pulido, can only be sought through a comparative framework that accounts for the ways in which the past shapes the present and future, while also making space to delve into …
Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought And Activism Through Seven Lives In India
"Seven voices contribute to this rare glimpse of the work being done on the front lines of the fight for social change in India. Playing with Fire is written in the collective voice of women employed by a large NGO as activists in their communities and is based on diaries, interviews, and conversations among them. Together their personal stories reveal larger themes and questions of sexism, casteism, and communalism, and a startling picture emerg…
Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography
As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and non-government organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the ‘deradicalization of feminist politics’ in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO se…
Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating “Lesbian” Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa
From East–West to North–South
Since the inception of Antipode in 1969, the world has changed.The 1970s saw a period of protest in the first world, and alternative national experiments in a third world flexing its wings and experimenting with non-alignment as colonialism came to an end.Through the 1980s, the two rival Cold War military and political systems shaped development possibilities in what we called the third world.While relations between either superpower (and client …
Collaboration Across Borders: Moving Beyond Positionality
Discussions about collaborative spaces in postcolonial feminist and geographical analyses have often hinged on questions of positionality, reflexivity and identity, largely in relation to the politics of representation. Such approaches have often led to an impasse, especially in fieldwork‐based feminist research, where reflexivity has mainly focused on examining the identities of the individual researcher rather than on the ways in which those id…
Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation
Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization
The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we iden…
Footloose Researchers, 'Traveling' Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis
(2002). Footloose Researchers, 'Traveling' Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis. Gender, Place & Culture: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 179-186
Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: Reflections from a journey
If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their ow…
Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography
As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and non-government organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the ‘deradicalization of feminist politics’ in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO se…
Communal Discourses, Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania
Focusing on communal discourses among South Asian groups in Tanzania, the author highlights the manner in which discourses around religion, caste and race shape gendered patterns of migration and marriage and the everyday politics of social boundaries in an immigrant community. The article demonstrates how discursive processes operating at the community level mediate between the household and the broader political economic processes. It also illu…
Muddying the waters: Coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism
This book forum extends a discussion that Laura Pulido first organized around Richa Nagar’s Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism at the 2015 Annual Meeting of
Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability
The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning fro…
The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold
Research Article| August 01 1996 The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold Richa Nagar Richa Nagar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1996) 16 (2): 62–80. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-16-2-62 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Richa Nagar; The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold. Comparative …
Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): Women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)
Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, this article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces t…
The Making of Hindu Communal Organizations, Places, and Identities in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam
The author focuses on the religious and caste-based (or 'communal') organizations and places of the Hindu immigrant community in postcolonial Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). The paper illustrates how communal organizations, and the contending public narratives that they generated, played a crucial role in defining Hindu communal places and the caste, class, and gender politics around these places. In highlighting these complex politics of multiple iden…
Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation
Feminists Talking across Worlds
(2002). Feminists Talking across Worlds. Gender, Place & Culture: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 167-172
I'd rather be rude than ruled
From East–West to North–South
Since the inception of Antipode in 1969, the world has changed.The 1970s saw a period of protest in the first world, and alternative national experiments in a third world flexing its wings and experimenting with non-alignment as colonialism came to an end.Through the 1980s, the two rival Cold War military and political systems shaped development possibilities in what we called the third world.While relations between either superpower (and client …
The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian Contribution
Robert G. Gregory challenges the apparent assumption that non-Western peoples lack a significant indigenous philanthropic culture. Focusing on the large South Asian community in East Africa, he relates how, over a century, they built a philanthropic culture of great magnitude, and how it finally collapsed under the ascendency of increasing state regulation and policies directed against non-African communities. Compelled by poverty to seek better …
Communal Places and the Politics of Multiple Identities: The Case of Tanzanian Asians
Collective Response: Social Justice, Difference, and the City
Young's argument for a group-differentiated, culturally pluralist form of social life is grounded in her compelling critiques of universalism and the dominant distributive paradigm of justice. Rejecting ‘the logic of identity’ that suppresses difference, and models of justice in which power is not seen as relational, she offers an alternative vision of social life that includes and empowers groups on their own terms. ‘City life’, which allows per…
Performing Embodied Translations: Decolonizing Methodologies of Knowing and Being
This performance and transcript emerge from a collaborative journey that grapples with what it might mean to agitate dominant pedagogical and methodological conventions of Eurocentric Angophone academia. Together, we perform an argument and a search: for multiple entry points into decolonizing feminisms; for multiple modes of knowing and being that can interrupt and challenge the epistemes that are rooted in thoughts and practices of colonialism …
Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation
This conversation with Richa Nagar about feminist friendships and co-authorships emerged from a collaborative interview as a way to resist individualism, career-centric-orientations and academic-stardom; themes that are prominent in the interview itself. The conversation explores the process of collaborative writing, how it challenges hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and what types of relationships sustain such an engagement, based on Ric…
Religion, Race, and the Debate over Mut'a in Dar es Salaam
Mut'a, or temporary marriage, is a contract between a married or unmarried man and an unmarried, divorced, or widowed woman that is religiously sanctioned by Shia Islam.' In the early 1990s, mut'a became the focal point of an intense debate in Dar es Salaam among the Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Muslims, one of the most populous and prosperous South Asian (hereafter, referred to as Asian) minority groups in Tanzania.2 Although people who participated …
Revisiting the epistemic terrains of gender, sex, and empowerment through four sites of engagement in India: Introducing a conversation
Knowledges that claim to end oppression and marginalization frequently end up feeding the same hierarchies that produce those oppressions. In the academy and in the development industry, it is not uncommon for ‘local’ or ‘subaltern’ knowledges to be positioned as ‘raw data’ to be utilised by the formally certified intellectual or expert, and even presented sometimes as obstacles to development goals that may have been imported from elsewhere . Th…
Gender, caste and movement: Lessons from Sangtin Yatra
This essay draws on ongoing translations of, and reflections on, journeys undertaken since 2002 with members of Sangtin in Uttar Pradesh. Sangtin, originally imagined as an NGO, has steadily evolved into Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), a largely women-led movement of 8000 small farmers and laborers, most of them identifying as Dalit. SKMS emerged from encounters with NGOs, academics, and artists whose fixed understandings of ‘feminism’ of…
Collective Response: Social Justice, Difference, and the City
Young's argument for a group-differentiated, culturally pluralist form of social life is grounded in her compelling critiques of universalism and the dominant distributive paradigm of justice. Rejecting ‘the logic of identity’ that suppresses difference, and models of justice in which power is not seen as relational, she offers an alternative vision of social life that includes and empowers groups on their own terms. ‘City life’, which allows per…
The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian Contribution
Robert G. Gregory challenges the apparent assumption that non-Western peoples lack a significant indigenous philanthropic culture. Focusing on the large South Asian community in East Africa, he relates how, over a century, they built a philanthropic culture of great magnitude, and how it finally collapsed under the ascendency of increasing state regulation and policies directed against non-African communities. Compelled by poverty to seek better …
The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold
Research Article| August 01 1996 The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold Richa Nagar Richa Nagar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1996) 16 (2): 62–80. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-16-2-62 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Richa Nagar; The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold. Comparative …
Communal Places and the Politics of Multiple Identities: The Case of Tanzanian Asians
The Making of Hindu Communal Organizations, Places, and Identities in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam
The author focuses on the religious and caste-based (or 'communal') organizations and places of the Hindu immigrant community in postcolonial Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). The paper illustrates how communal organizations, and the contending public narratives that they generated, played a crucial role in defining Hindu communal places and the caste, class, and gender politics around these places. In highlighting these complex politics of multiple iden…
Communal Discourses, Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania
Focusing on communal discourses among South Asian groups in Tanzania, the author highlights the manner in which discourses around religion, caste and race shape gendered patterns of migration and marriage and the everyday politics of social boundaries in an immigrant community. The article demonstrates how discursive processes operating at the community level mediate between the household and the broader political economic processes. It also illu…
Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): Women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)
Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, this article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces t…
I'd rather be rude than ruled
Religion, Race, and the Debate over Mut'a in Dar es Salaam
Mut'a, or temporary marriage, is a contract between a married or unmarried man and an unmarried, divorced, or widowed woman that is religiously sanctioned by Shia Islam.' In the early 1990s, mut'a became the focal point of an intense debate in Dar es Salaam among the Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Muslims, one of the most populous and prosperous South Asian (hereafter, referred to as Asian) minority groups in Tanzania.2 Although people who participated …
Lucknow Dispatch: War, Riots and Secularism
Footloose Researchers, 'Traveling' Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis
(2002). Footloose Researchers, 'Traveling' Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis. Gender, Place & Culture: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 179-186
Feminists Talking across Worlds
(2002). Feminists Talking across Worlds. Gender, Place & Culture: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 167-172
Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization
The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we iden…
Collaboration Across Borders: Moving Beyond Positionality
Discussions about collaborative spaces in postcolonial feminist and geographical analyses have often hinged on questions of positionality, reflexivity and identity, largely in relation to the politics of representation. Such approaches have often led to an impasse, especially in fieldwork‐based feminist research, where reflexivity has mainly focused on examining the identities of the individual researcher rather than on the ways in which those id…
Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation
Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating “Lesbian” Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa
From East–West to North–South
Since the inception of Antipode in 1969, the world has changed.The 1970s saw a period of protest in the first world, and alternative national experiments in a third world flexing its wings and experimenting with non-alignment as colonialism came to an end.Through the 1980s, the two rival Cold War military and political systems shaped development possibilities in what we called the third world.While relations between either superpower (and client …
Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought And Activism Through Seven Lives In India
"Seven voices contribute to this rare glimpse of the work being done on the front lines of the fight for social change in India. Playing with Fire is written in the collective voice of women employed by a large NGO as activists in their communities and is based on diaries, interviews, and conversations among them. Together their personal stories reveal larger themes and questions of sexism, casteism, and communalism, and a startling picture emerg…
Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography
As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and non-government organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the ‘deradicalization of feminist politics’ in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO se…
Reflexivity and Positionality in Feminist Fieldwork Revisited
Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles by Laura Pulido. Race, Radical Activism, and the Third World Left
Laura Pulido , Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles Why is it that Proposition 187, ostensibly targeting all undocumented persons in California, was seen by the public as a referendum on the Latinoization of California? The answer, according to Laura Pulido, can only be sought through a comparative framework that accounts for the ways in which the past shapes the present and future, while also making space to delve into …
Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis
Churnings of a movement: Sangtin's diary
This essay considers the relationships among silence, insight, violence, and possibilities in the context of movement making. It works through stories and vignettes associated with the lives of those who constitute a growing movement of peasants and laborers in the Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh to explore the power of affect in shaping a political struggle. In so doing, the essay grapples with some difficult questions: what kinds of silences …
Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: Reflections from a journey
If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their ow…
Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism
This book uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform the discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation, and genre blending in research and…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (30 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (19 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Media studies (8 works)