Maitrayee Deka is an academic, poet and writer at the University of Essex. Her research is in social theory, STS and economic sociology. Maitrayee's book, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, came out with Stanford University Press in 2023. 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 marginal spaces of Gen Z's social media to frame their worldview in a changing world. The first leg of this research was in Guwahati, where the everyday life of social media through multiple platforms gave an overview of young adults' concerns, accounting impressions from the local society and the global temporality of social media. Her poetry book Boiled or Cracked and the novel The Octogenarian will be out with Eastern Book House in 2025. In her creative and scholarly work, Maitrayee increasingly sees subjects, including the self, as a surface that reveals the frustrations of late capitalism and minutiae of memory, action and thinking as agile fissures in often obscure and closed elite structures.
Contact
Email: maitrayee.deka@essex.ac.uk
Instagram:Maitrayeedeka0
Professional Interests
At the University of Essex, Maitrayee works closely with two centres. She is the Co-Director for the Centre for Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESi) and founding member of the Centre for Global South Studies (CGSS). 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, she 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 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.
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