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, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. It ethnographically elaborated on the Braudelian middle layer of the market economy to assess sustainable forms of social reproduction without clear-cut capitalist tendencies. 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 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, collecting 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 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 mourning, joy and solidarity confront the neoliberal agenda of self-aggrandisement in all spheres of life.