Maitrayee Deka is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Poet and Novelist 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. It is an ethnography of Delhi's video game 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. Based on theoretical, historical and anthropological insights, it forwards the category bazaar as a way to think about economic systems that are non-monopolistic yet unaltruistic to the extent to achieve a moralistic character. Instead, bazaar emerges as middle layer of dense commerce that truly posit economic exchanges as one of the sustained basis for social connections of our times.
Maitrayee's current research is on the Whitechapel Market in London, where recurrent interviews with a solo trader shed light on public intellectualism on one hand and origin of ideas on the other. 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 structural insecurities and the breakdown of welfare structures. Maitrayee is intrigued by the uneasiness of existing at the moment which in many ways reflect the potential and real urgency for a different world.
