Ruchi Chaturvedi
2024
ruchi.chaturvedi@uct.ac.za
Dr. Chaturvedi is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.
As part of her remote appointment, Chaturvedi will join Center co-director Prof. Brinton Lykes and Lynch School of Education and Human Development Professor Alex听Pieterse to give at Venice International University from July 22-26, 2024.
Chaturvedi's professional overview:
In the last ten years, two sets of events have had a crucial influence on my professional trajectory鈥攖he growth of violent nationalism in India, and the intensified calls for a transformed more just curriculum in South Africa. I have responded to these events by building a research agenda that attends closely to lineages of political violence in India while reckoning with divisive politics across the world; by developing a teaching practice that creatively animates students鈥� engagements with fraught pasts and present of postcolonial polities; and by supporting a curriculum that trains them to not only critically study politics in the global south, but also re-think and re-make its hegemonic institutions, ideas and practices.
My publications and research emphasize the value of comparative insights to understand shared postcolonial inheritances鈥� forms of rule, political and judicial systems, political subjectivities, group violence and efforts to undo and repair their harm. The question of what it means to theorize about these topics in globally salient terms drawing on multiple disciplines and methodologies has become a crucial strand in my work as evident in my recent book Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (2023, Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan) and edited volume Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (2023, Wits University Press).
In the last few years, I have especially sought to develop modes of theoretical and historical analyses that juxtapose race and ethnicized differences on the African continent, and religion and caste on the Indian subcontinent. The affinities between anti-racist, anti-caste and anti-majoritarian thought and movements has become an important new focus of my work. Workshops and conferences I have been organizing on this topic, and research and analyses I have been carrying out are part of a larger collaboration with colleagues based in South Africa and several other parts of the global south who came together to create an A. W. Mellon funded consortium of seven universities in Africa, the Caribbean and Middle-East called 鈥極ther Universals: Thinking from the South on Traditions of Politics and Aesthetics.鈥�
My own research and engagement with political life in India has also found multiple media outlets. Since the ascendance of extreme right-wing groups to state power in India in 2014, I have sought to actively advocate against violent majoritarianism and repressive laws. The question of how we might recover a more just and equal India remains at the heart of campaigns I am a part of. This advocacy through various public platforms, lectures and writings has, in turn, sharpened my academic analyses and arguments about the relationship between modern political institutions and violence.
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