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.