Radhakrishnan
Biographic Data
| ID | 37265 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Radhakrishnan |
| FAMILY NAME | Radhakrishnan |
| SIGNATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wellesley College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1456-1293 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 267 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1958 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
What Is to Be Done: Expanding Our Feminist Imaginations
Reflecting on their recent book, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, the authors call for sociologists to urgently engage in the work of imagining a fairer future amid intersecting local and global crises. In particular, Radhakrishnan and Solari draw attention to hidden histories of women's organizing between the former Soviet and post-colonial world that together forged a vision for a fairer world based on social reproduction feminism. Rejecting …
Beyond #Girlboss and #Tradwife: Reclaiming Joy by Expanding Our Feminist Imagination
Hashtag feminism responds to White western women’s binds and the limits of "having it all" but overlooks the global, utopic feminist visions that might help struggling women everywhere forge paths toward liberatory futures
Evaluating urban heat island to achieve sustainable development goals: A case study of Tiruchirappalli city, India
Poverty as Subsistence: The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia
Can Audits Fuel Social Transformation? India's Revolutionary Effort to Employ the Rural Majority
Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries
High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration
Dancing the rainbow nation as it bleeds: The Surialanga Dance Company in post-apartheid South Africa
CONTACT Smitha Radhakrishnan [email protected] Sociology Department, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
Empowerment, Declined: Paradoxes of Microfinance and Gendered Subjectivity in Urban India
Microfinance today constitutes a gendered frontier of global capital, targeting working-class women for small loans through commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs). Drawing on ethnography and interviews with for-profit MFIs in India and their clients, this study aims to understand the mechanisms through which microfinance shapes gendered subjectivities at the outer edge of the global financial system. Through training programs that often acco…
Of loans and livelihoods: Gendered "social work" in urban India
Through an ethnographic study of commercial microlending in urban India, this article examines how "everyday" financialization reinscribes class and gender hierarchies in working-class communities at global finance's outer edges. Relatively privileged women deploy their knowledge of their communities to organize women, sometimes coercively, into precise formations that meet the exacting requirements of corporate microfinance institutions (MFIs). …
Tracing Microfinancial Value Chains
The global expansion of the microfinance sector demands new conceptual work that recognizes microfinance's simultaneous imbrication in profit-oriented global finance and socially oriented development programs. Drawing from our respective areas of specialization in Latin America and South Asia, and an extensive review of the literature, we posit here that microfinance is best understood as a global industry, with traceable value chains. Microfinan…
Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties
Notions of “empowered women,” promoted by NGOs, economists, and feminists beginning in the 1970s, do not necessitate a countervailing notion of “failed patriarchs.” However, our review of the feminist literatures on globalization, development, and migration in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and South Asia suggests that discourses of empowered women and failed patriarchs are fused in the specter of the “reverse gender order.” A presum…
Teaching Gender and Resistance from a World-Systems Perspective: We are in this Dance Together” in the Classroom and Beyond
of We Are in This Dance Together (WAITDT) in my 200-level Sociology course on Gender and International development. The reading went over so well that, over a year later, when I had the opportunity to design a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on global sociology, I got in contact with the author, and requested an interview with her about the book. The interview would later become part of the course materials for Sociology 108X, Introduction to…
Low Profile” or Entrepreneurial? Gender, Class, and Cultural Adaptation in the Global Microfinance Industry
Ethnography in Today's World: Color Full Before Color Blind
Diversity at Kaizen Motors: Gender, Race, Age, and Insecurity in a Japanese Auto Transplant
Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class
Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a "New" India
Development of Human Rights in an Indian Context
Albert Einstein, in an Address in Chicago observed: [t]he existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men towards each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily acc…
Examining the "Global" Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit
The phenomenal growth of India's information technology (IT) industry has produced a transnational class of professionals who are actively engaged in constructing a notion of a new India that is global in scope, yet Indian in essence. The affluent US-based Indian diaspora, along with professionals in India, co-construct a new India. This interaction has been enhanced through growing professional opportunities in India for immigrants who return. B…
Rethinking knowledge for development: Transnational knowledge professionals and the 'new' India
Time to Show Our True Colors: The Gendered Politics of “Indianness” in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Facing marginalization in the political context of the 'new South Africa' and lost social and economic privileges under a Black government, South African Indians articulate the need to keep up culture. In so doing, they simultaneously extend the isolation fostered through apartheid and utilize newly available political language to assert a partially disadvantaged minority voice in a distinctly gendered and racialized way. Echoing the spirit of na…
The Hindu View of Life
East and West: Some Reflections
Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a "New" India
Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class
Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties
Notions of “empowered women,” promoted by NGOs, economists, and feminists beginning in the 1970s, do not necessitate a countervailing notion of “failed patriarchs.” However, our review of the feminist literatures on globalization, development, and migration in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and South Asia suggests that discourses of empowered women and failed patriarchs are fused in the specter of the “reverse gender order.” A presum…
Examining the "Global" Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit
The phenomenal growth of India's information technology (IT) industry has produced a transnational class of professionals who are actively engaged in constructing a notion of a new India that is global in scope, yet Indian in essence. The affluent US-based Indian diaspora, along with professionals in India, co-construct a new India. This interaction has been enhanced through growing professional opportunities in India for immigrants who return. B…
Low Profile” or Entrepreneurial? Gender, Class, and Cultural Adaptation in the Global Microfinance Industry
Rethinking knowledge for development: Transnational knowledge professionals and the 'new' India
Empowerment, Declined: Paradoxes of Microfinance and Gendered Subjectivity in Urban India
Microfinance today constitutes a gendered frontier of global capital, targeting working-class women for small loans through commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs). Drawing on ethnography and interviews with for-profit MFIs in India and their clients, this study aims to understand the mechanisms through which microfinance shapes gendered subjectivities at the outer edge of the global financial system. Through training programs that often acco…
Time to Show Our True Colors: The Gendered Politics of “Indianness” in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Facing marginalization in the political context of the 'new South Africa' and lost social and economic privileges under a Black government, South African Indians articulate the need to keep up culture. In so doing, they simultaneously extend the isolation fostered through apartheid and utilize newly available political language to assert a partially disadvantaged minority voice in a distinctly gendered and racialized way. Echoing the spirit of na…
Poverty as Subsistence: The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia
Of loans and livelihoods: Gendered "social work" in urban India
Through an ethnographic study of commercial microlending in urban India, this article examines how "everyday" financialization reinscribes class and gender hierarchies in working-class communities at global finance's outer edges. Relatively privileged women deploy their knowledge of their communities to organize women, sometimes coercively, into precise formations that meet the exacting requirements of corporate microfinance institutions (MFIs). …
East and West: Some Reflections
The Hindu View of Life
Time to Show Our True Colors: The Gendered Politics of “Indianness” in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Facing marginalization in the political context of the 'new South Africa' and lost social and economic privileges under a Black government, South African Indians articulate the need to keep up culture. In so doing, they simultaneously extend the isolation fostered through apartheid and utilize newly available political language to assert a partially disadvantaged minority voice in a distinctly gendered and racialized way. Echoing the spirit of na…
Rethinking knowledge for development: Transnational knowledge professionals and the 'new' India
Development of Human Rights in an Indian Context
Albert Einstein, in an Address in Chicago observed: [t]he existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men towards each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily acc…
Examining the "Global" Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit
The phenomenal growth of India's information technology (IT) industry has produced a transnational class of professionals who are actively engaged in constructing a notion of a new India that is global in scope, yet Indian in essence. The affluent US-based Indian diaspora, along with professionals in India, co-construct a new India. This interaction has been enhanced through growing professional opportunities in India for immigrants who return. B…
Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a "New" India
Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class
Diversity at Kaizen Motors: Gender, Race, Age, and Insecurity in a Japanese Auto Transplant
Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties
Notions of “empowered women,” promoted by NGOs, economists, and feminists beginning in the 1970s, do not necessitate a countervailing notion of “failed patriarchs.” However, our review of the feminist literatures on globalization, development, and migration in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and South Asia suggests that discourses of empowered women and failed patriarchs are fused in the specter of the “reverse gender order.” A presum…
Teaching Gender and Resistance from a World-Systems Perspective: We are in this Dance Together” in the Classroom and Beyond
of We Are in This Dance Together (WAITDT) in my 200-level Sociology course on Gender and International development. The reading went over so well that, over a year later, when I had the opportunity to design a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on global sociology, I got in contact with the author, and requested an interview with her about the book. The interview would later become part of the course materials for Sociology 108X, Introduction to…
Low Profile” or Entrepreneurial? Gender, Class, and Cultural Adaptation in the Global Microfinance Industry
Ethnography in Today's World: Color Full Before Color Blind
Tracing Microfinancial Value Chains
The global expansion of the microfinance sector demands new conceptual work that recognizes microfinance's simultaneous imbrication in profit-oriented global finance and socially oriented development programs. Drawing from our respective areas of specialization in Latin America and South Asia, and an extensive review of the literature, we posit here that microfinance is best understood as a global industry, with traceable value chains. Microfinan…
Empowerment, Declined: Paradoxes of Microfinance and Gendered Subjectivity in Urban India
Microfinance today constitutes a gendered frontier of global capital, targeting working-class women for small loans through commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs). Drawing on ethnography and interviews with for-profit MFIs in India and their clients, this study aims to understand the mechanisms through which microfinance shapes gendered subjectivities at the outer edge of the global financial system. Through training programs that often acco…
Of loans and livelihoods: Gendered "social work" in urban India
Through an ethnographic study of commercial microlending in urban India, this article examines how "everyday" financialization reinscribes class and gender hierarchies in working-class communities at global finance's outer edges. Relatively privileged women deploy their knowledge of their communities to organize women, sometimes coercively, into precise formations that meet the exacting requirements of corporate microfinance institutions (MFIs). …
Dancing the rainbow nation as it bleeds: The Surialanga Dance Company in post-apartheid South Africa
CONTACT Smitha Radhakrishnan [email protected] Sociology Department, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration
Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries
Can Audits Fuel Social Transformation? India's Revolutionary Effort to Employ the Rural Majority
Evaluating urban heat island to achieve sustainable development goals: A case study of Tiruchirappalli city, India
Poverty as Subsistence: The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia
Beyond #Girlboss and #Tradwife: Reclaiming Joy by Expanding Our Feminist Imagination
Hashtag feminism responds to White western women’s binds and the limits of "having it all" but overlooks the global, utopic feminist visions that might help struggling women everywhere forge paths toward liberatory futures
What Is to Be Done: Expanding Our Feminist Imaginations
Reflecting on their recent book, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, the authors call for sociologists to urgently engage in the work of imagining a fairer future amid intersecting local and global crises. In particular, Radhakrishnan and Solari draw attention to hidden histories of women's organizing between the former Soviet and post-colonial world that together forged a vision for a fairer world based on social reproduction feminism. Rejecting …
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Geography (5 works) · History (5 works) · Psychology (5 works)