MA Delhi PhD Columbia

Consultation Times:
(by appointment) 
Please email me in advance.

Ruchi Chaturvedi is a political and legal anthropologist who works on cultures of democracy, popular politics and political violence in postcolonial democracies. She received her M.A. in Sociology from University of Delhi and her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Chaturvedi’s key research focus has been on formation of antagonistic political communities and emergence of violent majoritarianism in India. She is the author of Violence of Democracy: Inter-party conflict in South India, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2023. Her new project compares histories of nationalism and majoritarian formations in South Asia and South Africa attending particularly to womxn’s experience of violent transitions from coloniality to postcolonial rule. Chaturvedi also maintains a strong interest in the career of university apartheid in South Africa mapping changes that have taken place in Social Science and Humanities curriculums and pedagogies since 1994. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume on Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (Wits University Press).

At University of Cape Town, Chaturvedi co-convenes the interdisciplinary MPhil specializing in Theories of Justice and Inequality as well as the Mellon Foundation funded international consortium on Other Universals: Theorizing on Aesthetics and Politics from Postcolonial Locations. The project brings together students and faculty keen to think through 'universals' that have emanated from the experiences of marginality primarily from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly the African continent, South and South-west Asia, and the Caribbean.  

Recent Publications:

1. Political Violence, Criminal Law and Shifting Scales of Justice, in Don Nonini and Ida Susser edited Unsettled States, Movements in Flux, Migrants out of Place: The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, Routledge. 2020.
2. Violence, Democracy and the Major-Minor Question, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle-East. May 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-7493766
3. Political Society and Popular Politics in Africa, co-authored with Antina von Schintzler,  Introduction to special section, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle-East. May 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-7493722

You can download my detailed CV here