Tannistha Samanta
Biographic Data
| ID | 256916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tannistha Samanta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tannistha |
| FAMILY NAME | Samanta |
| SIGNATURE | SAMANTA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Flame University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4150-768X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Reading disgust
Senescence in fiction has been rarely studied in the cultural gerontological tradition in India. While later life associated with intergenerational authority, or enhanced religiosity or as a cultural process of worldly renunciation, have been themes in the phenomenological corpus of gerontology in India, studying the aging feminine body has remained outside the intellectual sensibilities of this field. In this paper, we analyze the short story, B…
Is Grandparenting Emotionally Fulfilling
Like much of South Asia, intergenerational transactions around care, economic security and affect are socially desired in India. Building upon this, we question these normatively “happy” transitions, especially into grandparenthood to move beyond the normative entrapments of family scripts and cultural morality around caregiving. Drawing from Bandura’s (2006) conceptualisation of self-efficacy and utilising the Longitudinal Aging Study in India, …
Curating the 'Care-Full' Home
The short film - The Care-Full Home - explores the datafication of everyday later lives vis-à-vis emerging technologies. The film was created over 48 hours during a hackathon focussing on ageing in a digital world. It uses satire as an overarching methodology to engage with the ambiguities of datafication and the uncertain boundaries between data and undata. In this accompanying piece, we outline the creation of The Care-Full Home and discuss the…
Publishing Research from the (Semi-)Peripheries
Opening Plenary
Ageing, consumption and middle-classness
In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cul…
Leisure as social engagement
The direct and indirect effects of social engagement suggest that depressive symptoms can be mitigated while enhancing overall wellbeing of older adults. This holds promise for social policy in redirecting efforts to develop age-friendly initiatives and social infrastructure that enhance the link between engagement and wellbeing
Social egg freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging
Leisure as self-care in the times of the pandemic
In this research note, we discuss how the pandemic forged a renewed interest in self-care among urban older Indians. A reflexive thematic analysis of time-use diaries (N = 15) allows us to examine leisure patterns and everyday subjectivities of middle-class older Indians. In particular, time-diaries reveal a heightened focus on leisure-based enacted self-care practices including meditation, online activity/learning, and socialising. Consistent wi…
The Trouble With Big Data by Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy
Tannistha Samanta reviews Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy’s The Trouble With Big Data (Bloomsbury), focusing on the Knowledge Complexity (KPLEX) Project researching big data’s failure points
Blocked by Gender
Globally, a gender gap in COVID-19 has been noted with men reporting higher share of both morbidity and deaths compared to women. While the gender gap in fatalities has been similar across the globe, there have been interesting disparities in the detection of COVID-19 cases in men and women. While wealthier, more developed nations have generally seen similar case detection in men and women, LMICs especially in Asia have seen far greater proportio…
Understanding the Role of Stigma and Misconceptions in the Experience of Epilepsy in India
It is surprising that although 12 million people in India suffer from epilepsy this remains a thoroughly under-researched area in the sociology of health and practice. We address this intellectual and policy neglect by reviewing the social, psychological and legal challenges governing the lives of people living with epilepsy (PWE) by paying particular attention to negotiations in arranged marriages and employment. Drawing on the analytical framew…
Living solo at midlife
Aging, housing markets and social inclusion
Embodied Aging
This study explores how South Asian Indian Gujarati older adults in Canada (Greater Vancouver area) strive to maintain personal continuity, citizenship, and selfhood through everyday body management practices (exercise/yoga, medication/health supplements, skin, and hair care routines) and cultural markers such as food, sartorial choices, and community engagement. This examination, we contend, is noteworthy against the backdrop of contemporary Nor…
Aging in e-place
In this short piece, I offer a reconfiguration of the term "aging in place" by analyzing media content of web-based senior-focused portals while demonstrating how these online consumer-driven spaces unwittingly re-create new social relations and imagined communities. Building on the sparse body of scholarship on extra-familial, kin-like networks, I reflect on the cultural possibility of internet spaces as surrogate "places" for later life non-kin…
Giving Voice to the Environment as the Silent Partner in Aging
Gerontological scholarship has long seen the environment to be a silent partner in aging. Environmental Gerontology, an established approach in Social Gerontology, has shown how the everyday lives of older adults are deeply entangled in socio-spatial environments. Adopting an Environmental Gerontology approach, we explore social and cultural dimensions of the association between out-of-home mobility and wellbeing among older adults in a north wes…
Of Public Spaces and Later-life Amity in Urban India
Media and age-coded representations of later life
This study examines the representation of older adults in print advertisements in an English-language magazine in post-reform India. Employing content analysis, this study finds a growing disenchantment of the Indian media with the image of a "happy joint family." A higher proportion of older adults are now portrayed alone or with younger adults compared to earlier portrayals with people of all age groups in an ad. Further, the portrayal of older…
The joint family and its discontents
Drawing from an interview based household survey of 453 older parent(s) and adult children (sons and daughters-in-law) in the Ahmedabad district, this study utilised the solidarity-conflict-ambivalence models to understand both the perceptions and experience of joint living. Overall, findings reinforce popular imagination of the socially-sanctioned joint family as a site of reassuring continuity with high levels of congruence in reporting relatio…
Successful aging
The Asian cultural import of the North American movement around “successful aging” is perhaps no surprise in a globally interconnected world. Coined by Havighurst (1961) and later popularized by Ro
The 'Good Life
In this piece, I outline the possibility of understanding old age through the lens of cultural gerontology highlighting the intersecting logics of age with consumption, leisure and identity. I argue that with rising affluence and demographic aging, India is poised to experience an emergent cultural movement, the Third Age (Laslett, 1989), wherein access to cultural capital and an active participation in a leisure culture will offer social members…
Family matters
This article aims to understand the complex interactions of family and intergenerational relationships in an emerging city in India. Demographic work on population ageing in India has primarily focused on family structure, health outcomes and institutional living. Though the focus of these studies has been on the Indian family, surprisingly, an in-depth study of the complex dialectic of the intergenerational relationships is often missing from th…
Living Arrangements and Health of Older Adults in India
Our study demonstrates that multigenerational households--the traditional and the most dominant form of living arrangement in India--have protective health benefits for older adults, while taking into account potential selection mechanisms. On Contrary to some epidemiological studies, we do not find any elevated risk of exposure to short-term illness, when older adults are living in households with young grandchildren
Living Arrangements and Health of Older Adults in India
Our study demonstrates that multigenerational households--the traditional and the most dominant form of living arrangement in India--have protective health benefits for older adults, while taking into account potential selection mechanisms. On Contrary to some epidemiological studies, we do not find any elevated risk of exposure to short-term illness, when older adults are living in households with young grandchildren
The joint family and its discontents
Drawing from an interview based household survey of 453 older parent(s) and adult children (sons and daughters-in-law) in the Ahmedabad district, this study utilised the solidarity-conflict-ambivalence models to understand both the perceptions and experience of joint living. Overall, findings reinforce popular imagination of the socially-sanctioned joint family as a site of reassuring continuity with high levels of congruence in reporting relatio…
Family matters
This article aims to understand the complex interactions of family and intergenerational relationships in an emerging city in India. Demographic work on population ageing in India has primarily focused on family structure, health outcomes and institutional living. Though the focus of these studies has been on the Indian family, surprisingly, an in-depth study of the complex dialectic of the intergenerational relationships is often missing from th…
The 'Good Life
In this piece, I outline the possibility of understanding old age through the lens of cultural gerontology highlighting the intersecting logics of age with consumption, leisure and identity. I argue that with rising affluence and demographic aging, India is poised to experience an emergent cultural movement, the Third Age (Laslett, 1989), wherein access to cultural capital and an active participation in a leisure culture will offer social members…
Ageing, consumption and middle-classness
In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cul…
Social egg freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging
Leisure as self-care in the times of the pandemic
In this research note, we discuss how the pandemic forged a renewed interest in self-care among urban older Indians. A reflexive thematic analysis of time-use diaries (N = 15) allows us to examine leisure patterns and everyday subjectivities of middle-class older Indians. In particular, time-diaries reveal a heightened focus on leisure-based enacted self-care practices including meditation, online activity/learning, and socialising. Consistent wi…
Aging, housing markets and social inclusion
Of Public Spaces and Later-life Amity in Urban India
Living Arrangements and Health of Older Adults in India
Our study demonstrates that multigenerational households--the traditional and the most dominant form of living arrangement in India--have protective health benefits for older adults, while taking into account potential selection mechanisms. On Contrary to some epidemiological studies, we do not find any elevated risk of exposure to short-term illness, when older adults are living in households with young grandchildren
Family matters
This article aims to understand the complex interactions of family and intergenerational relationships in an emerging city in India. Demographic work on population ageing in India has primarily focused on family structure, health outcomes and institutional living. Though the focus of these studies has been on the Indian family, surprisingly, an in-depth study of the complex dialectic of the intergenerational relationships is often missing from th…
Successful aging
The Asian cultural import of the North American movement around “successful aging” is perhaps no surprise in a globally interconnected world. Coined by Havighurst (1961) and later popularized by Ro
The 'Good Life
In this piece, I outline the possibility of understanding old age through the lens of cultural gerontology highlighting the intersecting logics of age with consumption, leisure and identity. I argue that with rising affluence and demographic aging, India is poised to experience an emergent cultural movement, the Third Age (Laslett, 1989), wherein access to cultural capital and an active participation in a leisure culture will offer social members…
Media and age-coded representations of later life
This study examines the representation of older adults in print advertisements in an English-language magazine in post-reform India. Employing content analysis, this study finds a growing disenchantment of the Indian media with the image of a "happy joint family." A higher proportion of older adults are now portrayed alone or with younger adults compared to earlier portrayals with people of all age groups in an ad. Further, the portrayal of older…
The joint family and its discontents
Drawing from an interview based household survey of 453 older parent(s) and adult children (sons and daughters-in-law) in the Ahmedabad district, this study utilised the solidarity-conflict-ambivalence models to understand both the perceptions and experience of joint living. Overall, findings reinforce popular imagination of the socially-sanctioned joint family as a site of reassuring continuity with high levels of congruence in reporting relatio…
Aging in e-place
In this short piece, I offer a reconfiguration of the term "aging in place" by analyzing media content of web-based senior-focused portals while demonstrating how these online consumer-driven spaces unwittingly re-create new social relations and imagined communities. Building on the sparse body of scholarship on extra-familial, kin-like networks, I reflect on the cultural possibility of internet spaces as surrogate "places" for later life non-kin…
Giving Voice to the Environment as the Silent Partner in Aging
Gerontological scholarship has long seen the environment to be a silent partner in aging. Environmental Gerontology, an established approach in Social Gerontology, has shown how the everyday lives of older adults are deeply entangled in socio-spatial environments. Adopting an Environmental Gerontology approach, we explore social and cultural dimensions of the association between out-of-home mobility and wellbeing among older adults in a north wes…
Of Public Spaces and Later-life Amity in Urban India
Living solo at midlife
Aging, housing markets and social inclusion
Embodied Aging
This study explores how South Asian Indian Gujarati older adults in Canada (Greater Vancouver area) strive to maintain personal continuity, citizenship, and selfhood through everyday body management practices (exercise/yoga, medication/health supplements, skin, and hair care routines) and cultural markers such as food, sartorial choices, and community engagement. This examination, we contend, is noteworthy against the backdrop of contemporary Nor…
The Trouble With Big Data by Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy
Tannistha Samanta reviews Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy’s The Trouble With Big Data (Bloomsbury), focusing on the Knowledge Complexity (KPLEX) Project researching big data’s failure points
Blocked by Gender
Globally, a gender gap in COVID-19 has been noted with men reporting higher share of both morbidity and deaths compared to women. While the gender gap in fatalities has been similar across the globe, there have been interesting disparities in the detection of COVID-19 cases in men and women. While wealthier, more developed nations have generally seen similar case detection in men and women, LMICs especially in Asia have seen far greater proportio…
Understanding the Role of Stigma and Misconceptions in the Experience of Epilepsy in India
It is surprising that although 12 million people in India suffer from epilepsy this remains a thoroughly under-researched area in the sociology of health and practice. We address this intellectual and policy neglect by reviewing the social, psychological and legal challenges governing the lives of people living with epilepsy (PWE) by paying particular attention to negotiations in arranged marriages and employment. Drawing on the analytical framew…
Leisure as social engagement
The direct and indirect effects of social engagement suggest that depressive symptoms can be mitigated while enhancing overall wellbeing of older adults. This holds promise for social policy in redirecting efforts to develop age-friendly initiatives and social infrastructure that enhance the link between engagement and wellbeing
Social egg freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging
Leisure as self-care in the times of the pandemic
In this research note, we discuss how the pandemic forged a renewed interest in self-care among urban older Indians. A reflexive thematic analysis of time-use diaries (N = 15) allows us to examine leisure patterns and everyday subjectivities of middle-class older Indians. In particular, time-diaries reveal a heightened focus on leisure-based enacted self-care practices including meditation, online activity/learning, and socialising. Consistent wi…
Publishing Research from the (Semi-)Peripheries
Opening Plenary
Ageing, consumption and middle-classness
In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cul…
Curating the 'Care-Full' Home
The short film - The Care-Full Home - explores the datafication of everyday later lives vis-à-vis emerging technologies. The film was created over 48 hours during a hackathon focussing on ageing in a digital world. It uses satire as an overarching methodology to engage with the ambiguities of datafication and the uncertain boundaries between data and undata. In this accompanying piece, we outline the creation of The Care-Full Home and discuss the…
Reading disgust
Senescence in fiction has been rarely studied in the cultural gerontological tradition in India. While later life associated with intergenerational authority, or enhanced religiosity or as a cultural process of worldly renunciation, have been themes in the phenomenological corpus of gerontology in India, studying the aging feminine body has remained outside the intellectual sensibilities of this field. In this paper, we analyze the short story, B…
Is Grandparenting Emotionally Fulfilling
Like much of South Asia, intergenerational transactions around care, economic security and affect are socially desired in India. Building upon this, we question these normatively “happy” transitions, especially into grandparenthood to move beyond the normative entrapments of family scripts and cultural morality around caregiving. Drawing from Bandura’s (2006) conceptualisation of self-efficacy and utilising the Longitudinal Aging Study in India, …
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Aging and Gerontology Research (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)