Ishani Dasgupta is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago. She received her joint PhD in Anthropology and South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining UChicago, she was an Andrew W. Mellon HILLS Postdoctoral Fellow at Case Western Reserve University (2023) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville (2022). Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, she has collaborated with grassroots political organizations to understand how stateless communities practice resistance, navigate exclusion, and engage in alternative forms of political belonging and care. Her work has appeared in Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), Journal of Refugee Studies, Himalaya, and American Ethnologist.
This event is presented within the Culture, Power, and Social Change (CPSC) Colloquium (UCLA Department of Anthropology) and co-sponsored by the UCLA Program on Central Asia and UCLA Center for India and South Asia.