Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Archives

Dr. Mamatha Gandham is an independent researcher whose work delves into the intersection of labor, gender, and social movements. She holds an MA in History from the University of Hyderabad and earned her PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi in December 2023. Her doctoral research was supported by the ICSSR Institutional Doctoral Fellowship (2017–2019).

Dr. Gandham’s research focuses on the organization of women workers within labor movements, examining how the interconnected realms of production and social reproduction shape women’s participation in these movements. Her work sheds light on the structural challenges and opportunities for women’s labor mobilization in India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Gandham is investigating the experiences of women workers in the gig economy. Her research delves into their working conditions, and their efforts to collectivize and build bargaining power. In an era where the gig economy is reshaping employment patterns, Dr. Gandham’s work critically explores its gendered dimensions and the potential for labor mobilization within this sector. Through this fellowship, she aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the pathways for collective action among women gig workers in India.

Ms. Devika Singh Shekhawat is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has a master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lies at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues.

Ms. Shekhawat is a writer, educator and research scholar. She has written on the history and memory of migration of tea plantation workers of Assam for Zubaan Publication and co-authored a book chapter with the Programme of Social Actions – The Research Collective on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation and labor relations in northeast India. Her research on the work of ASHA workers in tea plantations during the pandemic has been published as a book chapter with Northeast Social Research Centre and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

Her Ph.D. research project explores the relationship between health and labor that manifests itself in the body of the worker and their everyday life. She engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker and the conditions for ailments and disease created for the worker in the tea plantations of Assam. Through a study of labor relations and structural conditions of work, her research attempts to explore how health and labor operate in tea plantations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Shekhawat is working with Dr. Sarah Besky at the South Asia Program at Cornell University to carry forward her Ph.D. research work. She is focusing on how conditions of structural reproduction of ill-health are produced and understood within the plantation economy.