Author Archives: Sumi Madhok

About Sumi Madhok

Sumi Madhok is associate professor of transnational gender studies at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (Routledge, 2013), which through an ethnography of the life trajectories of developmentalism and rights in northwest India proposes a different theoretical framework for conceptualizing agency and coercion. She is also the coeditor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (Sage, 2014). Currently, she is completing a monograph on decolonizing human rights provisionally titled "Vernacular Rights Cultures, Gender and Citizenship in South Asia.''

On Vernacular Rights Cultures and the Political Imaginaries of Haq

January 18, 2018 by
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Around the globe, we are witnessing multitudinous struggles over rights. Several of these are collective struggles by marginal and dispossessed groups over what Walter Mignolo has termed “life rights” with some resisting precarity and dispossession heralded in by neoliberal developmentalism and its championing of privatization of natural resources: mountains, minerals, forests, rivers and streams; while others are struggling to redefine the substantive content of existing formal constitutional guarantees.1 The key question this essay asks is: How do we conceptually capture these rights struggles? In South Continue reading → Continue reading →