Mitchell Institute Visiting Scholar Dr Nandita Banerjee Dhawan (Jadavpur University) will be delivering the Athena Swan 2025 Lecture of the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work on 28 May.

In the talk, Nandita will critically examine the strategic calculations and political constructions of ‘belonging’ and ‘othering’ as integral to majoritarian privilege in contemporary India.  Focusing on gender as the terrain where religious-cultural and national-political tensions unfold, she will argue that Hindu(tva) rhetoric was mainstreamed well before 2014, challenging assumptions that fundamentalism and religious-cultural exclusion are exclusive to a particular political ideology.

Nandita will explore how patriarchal institutions – family, religion and academia – historically (re)produce gendered norms.  These institutions use ‘legitimacy’ tropes, blending economic liberalism with cultural liberalism to uphold the hegemony of the ‘New Indian (Hindu) Middle Class’.  As a ‘New Indian (Hindu) woman’, she employs feminist tools of self-reflexivity to interrogate the liberal and secular façade of this discourse, of which she is also a part.  This critical engagement allows her to assess the (im)possibilities of disrupting the hegemonic social order to achieve gender and intersectional justice. 

Dr Nandita Banerjee Dhawan

Dr Banerjee Dhawan is an Associate Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University.  She is a Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute and an AHSS Global Fellow (2024-25) at the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS), Queen’s University Belfast. 

Nandita is working with Institute Fellows Professor Dina Belluigi (Legacy) and  Dr Ulrike M Vieten (Religion, Arts and Peacebuilding)  and Mitchell Institute Visiting Scholar Dr Asha Achuthan (Assistant Professor at the Advanced Centre for Women's Studies, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), on the research project Counter-stories of author-ity in transition: Women in the Indian Academy. 

Read more about the project here.