Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Dixita Deka "Arms to Farms: Making of the Farming Collectives and Post-Insurgency Recovery in Northeast India"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

-----------------------------------------
Dixita Deka is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher from Assam, India. With her BA and MA degrees in Political Science from Cotton College and Gauhati University, she has completed her MPhil (2017) and PhD (2021) in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati Campus, India. Her MPhil dissertation focused on the gender dynamics of insurgent organizations in Northeast India, particularly the oral histories of women insurgents in Assam. Her PhD explored the politics of memorializing militarization in Assam in the 1990s and examined the symbiotic relationship between power and violence based on ethnographic narratives. Before joining Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC), Guwahati where she worked in a project on food sovereignty in the Eastern Himalayas funded by the Swedish Research Council. During the project, she carried her fieldwork in Northeast India, Bangladesh, and Nepal’s Mount Everest Region. Her first book, Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023), is a co-authored, open access book written with her project team and the community. At Yale, she plans to expand her research on food sovereignty exploring the functioning of farming cooperatives in Northeast India.

Dixita’s writings are published by Zubaan, Asian Ethnicity, Economic & Political Weekly, Raiot, Seminar, The India Forum, Biblio, The Daily Star, Frontline, LSE Review of Books, South Asia @LSE blog amongst others. She is the recipient of the Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grant for Young Researchers from Northeast India (2019), the Annual VMMF-IAWS Young Research Scholars Award (2020), South Asia Speaks Fellow (2022), and the Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) grant from the Association for Asian Studies (2024) for her book project Underground Women. Dixita’s current interest has been exploring collaborations with visual artists for disseminating her research. She is a member of the Roots & Bridges Collective, which has been organizing an annual ethnography writing workshop since 2014 for PhD scholars particularly from Northeast India researching the region.