Priti Ramamurthy

About

Priti Ramamurthy is a professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist political economist whose research focuses on questions of social reproduction—how marginalized individuals craft meaningful lives through daily and intergenerational processes of reproduction. Her work includes two major research studies: one titled 'City Lives, Rural Ties,' which explores the lived experiences of urban migrants in India and their ongoing connections to rural villages, and another examining the relationship between rural social reproduction and agrarian transformation in Telangana, India, over three decades. Ramamurthy has contributed to methodological advancements through her articulation of feminist commodity chain analysis, a framework for tracking value creation and gendered identities within global production. She has also co-edited and co-authored 'The Modern Girl Around the World,' a study on modernity, consumption, and globalization. Her research engages with themes of gender, labor, development, and transnational social processes, and she has received numerous fellowships and grants supporting her scholarly work.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Biology
• Law
• Gender studies
• History

Selected publications

• Agrarian questions of labor in urban India: middle migrants, translocal householding and the intersectional politics of social reproduction

  The Journal of Peasant Studies · 2018-09-19 · 81 citations

  articleSenior author

  Our paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of ‘cultural production’. Our term ‘middle migrants’ characterizes households…

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity

  Hypatia · 2020 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to co…

  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  Feminist Studies · 2017-01-01 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui on…

  PublisherDOI

• Translocal Householding

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2020-05-01 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The urban experience remains inextricably entangled with the rural for millions of poor migrants to cities in the global South who labor in informal economies. Translocal households, households that share the labor and costs of social reproduction spatially across the city and the country, are an important site of entanglement, empirically and imaginatively. The dynamics of translocal householding in the oral histories of two migrants to Delhi reveal intermittent pathways of escape from…

  PublisherDOI

• Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion

  The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  At the end of January 2020, three weeks before Italy reported its first Corona virus infection, the Chinese community of Prato, around fifty thousand people—a quarter of this small northern textile...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ashwini Tambe

  5 shared

• Vinay Gidwani

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

• Judith Kegan Gardiner

  4 shared

• Alys Eve Weinbaum

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Lynn M. Thomas

  3 shared

• Madeleine Yue Dong

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  3 shared

• Uta G. Poiger

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Society of Scholars, Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2019…
• Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Fellowshi…
• ACLS Research Collaborative Fellowship, 2015-17
• American Institute of Indian Studies Fellowship, 2015-2016
• American Institute for Indian Studies Fellowship, 2006-2007

Similar researchers at University of Washington

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• Shirley J. Yeeh-13
• Amanda Lock Swarrh-11