Sucharita Sarkar is Associate Professor of English, D.T.S.S College of Commerce, Mumbai. Her doctoral thesis investigated mothering narratives in contemporary India. Currently, she is the co-recipient of an international collaborative grant (2020-2021) from the American Academy of Religion for a project on motherhood and religions. Some of her recent publications include articles in Current Sociology (2021); Qualitative Inquiry (2020); Open Theology (2020); and chapters in Representing Abortion (Routledge, 2021); Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice (Routledge, 2020); The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2020), among others.
Publications:
Sarkar, S. “Not transaction but service? Interrogating the multiple surrogacy narratives in India.” Current Sociology, January 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120964906.
Sarkar, S. “Pregnancy, Birthing, Breastfeeding and Mothering: Hindu Perspectives from Scriptures and Practices.” Open Theology 2020; 6, Topical Issue: Motherhood(s) in Religions: The Religionification of Motherhood and Mothers’ Appropriation of Religion (Ed. Giulia Pedrucci), pp. 104–116. https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0010.
Sarkar, S. “From compulsion to choice? The changing representations of abortion in India.” Representing Abortion. Ed. Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst. London: Routledge, 2021. Pp.177-189.
Sarkar, S. “Maternal Intimacies Online: How Indian Mom-bloggers Reconfigure Self, Body, Family and Community.” The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India: Anxiety and Intimacy, ed. Kaustav Chakraborty. London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 219-239.
Sarkar, S. “Durga, Supermom and the Posthuman Mother India.” Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, eds. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape. New Delhi: Springer India, 2016, pp. 159-176.
Areas of Interest:
Intersections of motherhood and mothering with body, gender, culture, religion, media, rights, and technologies, especially from a South Asian perspective
Statement of Interest:
I applaud the initiative that birthed the Indian Posthumanism Network and I am very interested in the activities and scholarship of this collective. Leading lives that are so deeply embedded in technology makes me keen to learn about and participate in existing and emerging conversations on posthumanism; and this keenness has increased in the past COVID-19 year, which demonstrated, once again, how enmeshed and dependent our human lives have become with/on the machinic. I am interested in posthumanism from multiple perspectives: the imagined posthuman futures of science fiction, the ethnography of our trans/posthuman presents, and the theories that explain and explore the range of posthuman realities and possibilities. From the point of view of my own research, which is related mostly to maternity, there are certain intersections with posthumanism, like Artificial Reproductive Technologies, or the internet, which I want to examine in depth. Besides, as a researcher working between humanities and social sciences, I am also interested in Rosi Braidotti’s expansion of the term posthumanism to posthumanities: in how do we envision a ‘post-’ future for what is termed as a crisis of the humanities? I am not seeking easy answers, but vibrant conversations and sharing of resources.