Maitrayee Deka is an academic, poet and writer at the University of Essex. Her research is in social theory, technology and economic sociology. Maitrayee's book, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. elaborated on the Braudelian middle layer of the market economy to assess sustainable forms of social reproduction without clear-cut capitalist tendencies. Traders and Tinkers is an ethnography of Delhi's video game street sellers and their relationship with the materiality of technology existing as a form of urban commons and yet positions a distinct aesthetic and ethics of immediacy outside of bourgeois notions of living the city. Her current research is on the Whitechapel Market in London, looking at marketplaces as intellectual places and drawing from the literature on public space and autonomist Marxism. Maitrayee's new research explores Gen Z's social media contextualising it in the twentieth century relationship between being, time and technology. The first leg of this research was in Guwahati, and the second phase is underway in Colchester . Her poetry book Boiled or Cracked and the novel The Octogenarian is out with Eastern Book House. In her creative and scholarly work, increasingly Maitrayee sees subjects, including the self, as a surface that reveals fissures, especially at a time when places for collective deliberation, joy and solidarity confront the neoliberal agenda of self-aggrandisement and the breakdown of welfare structures. She is intrigued by the uneasiness of existing at the moment which in many ways reflect the potential and real urgency for a different world.
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Contact
Email: maitrayee.deka@essex.ac.uk
Johan Fischer writers in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
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Traders and Tinkers carefully describes why and how bazaars can be seen as alternatives to globalized capitalist systems. Bazaars uphold a communal approach toward resources, specifically items and areas that belong to the public, and they contribute to the exchange of knowledge, tools and communication that exists informally beyond formalized knowledge systems. The author has set a new standard for thoughtful, clear, and constructive scholarship on this important and relevant topic.
Other Features ​​
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Latest Publication
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The Petty Bourgeoisie: What is its Political Potential? The Political Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13466
Know more about Boiled or Cracked and The Octogenarian here
Latest Talks
The Subtle World of Brands, Keynote: Social Life of Brands, University of Naples, 27-28, June 2025
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Digital Labour, Game of Tech, Naples 9 April 2025
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Rough Work
Professional Interests
Maitrayee is the Co-Director for the Centre for Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI) at Essex. She is also the founding member and in the advisory board of Centre for Global South Studies (CGSS) at Essex In these roles, Maitrayee is keen to include conversations and voices that make the global world political by critically exploring what it means to live together in a fragile planetary system. In an academic space, Maitrayee is closer to approaches that bring new perspectives from the most quotidian to complex issues and how often open dialogues introduce negotiation, intellectual rigour and healing spaces. Maitrayee is drawn to experimental and speculative thinking deeply rooted in material and subjective points of view.
Teaching
Maitrayee teaches social theory modules at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her teaching focuses on rethinking the classics and including new theoretical and historical perspectives from geographies and formerly marginalised ideas."Modernity" emerges as a key concept through which a global world is imagined and lived--Who has historically claimed to be modern, when does being modern become problematic and why (if at all) do we need to engage with the concept. The seminars are designed to be interactive and review the role of critical thinking in contemporary times from the students' standpoint.