Sutapa Chattopadhyay
Sutapa Chattopadhyay is a geographer. She is currently working at St. Francis Xavier University at the departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Development Studies. Her areas of interest are migrations, sexuality-precarity-illegality, development politics, movements, political ecology and indigeniety. She pursues her research on migrant incarceration, borders, and autonomy in Rome and on indigenous food sovereignty issues in Andhra Pradesh. She is an editor of Interface (a journal for and on social movements) and in the advisory board of ACME (a critical geography journal). Both the journals are open access. She has published in ACME; Gender, Place and Culture; Population, Place and Space, Environment and Planning D, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism on indigenous anti-colonial struggles, development-induced dislocation of indigenous people, colonial and post colonial appropriation of bodies and nature, anarcha eco-feminist pedagogy, feminist research methodologies, and border politics. She has co-edited a book on Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy with Routledge. Now she is working on a book manuscript on the politics of development impelled mobility and its impacts on wider indigenous women’s struggles with Palgrave; and on a journal special issue related to migrant identity with Geopolitics.
RESEARCH FUNDING HISTORY
2021 – 2023
Social Science Humanities Research Council – Insight Development Grant – From Precarity to Autonomy: SOGIE South Asian Migrants in Rome, Italy (72,763CAD)
2019– 2021
- Social Science Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant (SIG): Project - Migrant Lives in Waiting, Borders and Action Research (CAD 7000)
KNOWLEDGE & TECHNOLOGY TRANSLATION
2022
Organization and panel discussant in Migration, Borders, Action Research panel
Activist and Scholar-activists from Atlantic Nova Scotia as participants.
Sponsored by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) SIG grant and Women’s and Gender Studies and Development Studies, St, Francis Xavier University.
2019
Presentation, poster making, community engagement
St. Francis Xavier University, Women’s and Gender Studies and Antigonish Women’s Association
Presented a broad overview of the connections with Environmental/Climate Change and Feminism to students and community members.
COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP
2021
Committee member, Frank McKenna Center for Leadership. St. Francis Xavier University.
To support students to engage with university life beyond the classroom, and to assist students in the development of bold, innovative, and creative solutions to the most pressing problems of our time. The board members decide on student grant applications to provide skills training, opportunities for professionalization and financial support for all students. Also, the board members are engaged in deciding on scholarly talks and seminars organized through the center.
MOST SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS
2021
‘Postcolonial development and Forced Mobility – Gender, Indigeneity and Ecology’.
This book is an offshoot of my dissertation on Indigenous forced dislocation due to a massive development project. The book details anticolonial struggles and postcolonial land-based resistance besides narrating socio-cultural and economic transformations of gendered Indigenous relocated communities.
2020
‘Organizing amidst COVID-19’ with Interface, a journal for and about social movements (published April-May 2020). This work was collaborated with Laurence Cox and Lesley Wood. We received 38 papers, more than 50 authors, and from every continent.
2017
Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy
This is a co-edited book with Pierpaolo Mudu. This book most significantly contributed to the squatting and migration connection drawing articles from close to 30 authors, 23 chapters and 4 sections. It is an interdisciplinary and intersectional intervention that is widely used by academic and activist people. The book has been widely cited and sold more than couple hundred copies.
INVITED TALKS & EVENTS
2022
- Migration Panel with scholars and activist groups with Atlantic Canada (St. Francis Xavier University and Antigonish Public Library)
2020
- Guest Speaker: Borders, Migration and Critical Political Theory (CAPED, Collectif de recherche Action Politique et Démocratie, Montréal)
2019
- Educational Forum: Speaker (St. Francis Xavier University and Antigonish Public Library)
- HIVE for Feminist Research: Speaker (St. Francis Xavier University)
- McKenna Scholar in Residence Professor Adolph Reed: Panelist (St. Francis Xavier University)
- Guest Speaker: Migration, Borders and Action research (St. Mary’s University)
- Migration and Border Studies (rigid borders, incarceration, autonomy, i/legality, precarity, racialized and sexualized migrants)
- Development (social movements, political ecology, development politics and indigeneity)
- Regional Specialization (South Asia and Europe)
See a list of recent publications on Google Scholar
Active Grants
SSHRC – Insight Development Grant. CAD 72,763
Title of the project - From Precarity to Autonomy: SOGIE South Asian Migrants in Rome, Italy
Principal Applicant- Sutapa Chattopadhyay
SSHRC – Partnership Engage Grant. CAD 23,475
Title of the project - To the frontiers of Maya women’s food producing initiatives in Belize
Principal Applicant- Sutapa Chattopadhyay
Co -Applicants - Filiberto Penados (Galen University); Levi J. Gahman (University of Liverpool)
SSHRC – SIG Explore Grant. CAD 7,000
Title of the Project – Migrant Lives in-Waiting, Borders, and Action Research
Principal Applicant – Sutapa Chattopadhyay
Selected Publications
Mohamed, N., Chattopadhyay, S., and Gahman, L. In press. Feminist Development Justice as Emancipatory Praxis: Recognising the Knowledge of Social Movements "From Below." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Forthcoming, 1-25. [Peer-Reviewed]
Laurence Cox, Anna Szolucha, Alberto Arribas, Sutapa Chattopadhyay. In press. Handbook on Research Methods and Applications in Social Movements. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. [Peer-Reviewed]
Chattopadhyay, Sutapa. 2022. Politics of Development and Forced Mobility: Gender, Indigeneity, Ecology – Mobility and Politics Series. London: Palgrave. [Peer-Reviewed]
Chattopadhyay, Sutapa. In press. Making Sense of the Narmada Movements through Adivasi Narratives. Handbook on qualitative methods in social movements. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. [Peer-Reviewed]
Sutapa Chattopadhyay and Pierpaolo Mudu. 2022. Introduction to the Special Issue: Rethinking the ‘migrant position’ around Contested discourses and practices. Geopolitics. Taylor and Francis Group. Impact Factor 3.29. [Peer-Reviewed]
