Subhankar Dutta
PhD Student at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India
Website:
Research Interests
Performance Studies
Youth and Activism
Kinship and Rituals
Identity/Culture/Race
South Asia
Research Projects
Doctoral Research
My work largely falls under performance studies. Through community festivity and rituals, it looks into the notions of pain and purification among the youth and children participating in various rites. The representation and construction of religious ideology, as reflected through the participating youth in the hook-swinging festival, are significant aspects of my research.
Projects
2021-ongoing: Research Associate (RA) and Project Field Investigator (FI)
ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research) major research project: Performing Arts Industry: The Economic and Livelihood Implications on Artists and Cultural Impact on Society due to COVID-19.
The project aims to access the economic and artistic challenges faced by twelve different groups of artists across India during and immediately after the two phases of the global pandemic. With both qualitative and quantitative methodology of data collection and in-person interviews, the project enquires into the hardship of more than a thousand artists of various artforms to suggest new necessary policies and recommends administrative steps for the protection, continuation, and preservation of the socio-economically deprived section of artists in India.
2021-2022: Research Intern at The Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective: South Asia (CCYSC).
Series Editor of Essays on- Protest, Politics, and Possibilities: The Being and Becoming of Youth Activism in South Asia. (Link: https://www.theccysc.com/youth-activism-in-south-asia).
The feature essay series engages with various movements of expression of South Asian youth through the different epochs of history, performance, narrativisation, and other intersections to look at the transformative modality of youth self-fashioning and their political becoming at different identifiable socio-cultural locations. It also includes my editorial piece, “Protest, Politics, and Performance: South Asian Youth in the Age of Globalisation.” The editorial piece explores the performative self of alternative protest movements, its spatial and visual manifestation, as an embodied tool of resistance in the South Asian context. The essay illustrates the different dynamics of youth performance where the ‘youth figure’ in itself becomes a site of protest and political weapon by adapting creative methods of activism.
Published Works
Dutta, Subhankar. 2022. “Popular Culture and Emergent Digital Media: A Contemporary Introspection through the Hook Swinging (Gajan) Festival and Performances.” In ICDRCT Conference proceeding. Taylor and Francis.
Dutta, Subhankar. 2021. “Protest, Politics, and Performance: South Asian Youth in the Age of Globalisation.” CCYSC. https://www.theccysc.com/protest-politics-and-performance-subhankar-dutta
Dutta, Subhankar. 2021. “Baba’s Old Tin Box.” TYMS Review September 2021: Displacement and Resettlementcaused by floods. Environmental Humanities Centre, Amsterdam.
Dutta, Subhankar. 2021. Co-edited volume Musings on Pandemic: An Anthology of Poetry. Author’s Press, New Delhi.