GCSJ seminar series: Nightmarch: in conversation with Professor Alpa Shah

In this session we have the pleasure of speaking to Alpa Shah, Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science, who will provide an insight into her critically acclaimed and award-winning book, Nightmarch.

This fascinating book is based on a prolonged period of ethnographic research that involved Shah living among the Naxalites, a group of Marx, Lenin and Mao-inspired ideologues and guerrillas, who took up arms to fight for a fairer society. Alongside years of living with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah embarked on a seven-night trek with some members of the group, traversing 250 kilometres of dense and hilly forests in eastern India.

This session will unpack what motivated Shah to conduct her research, explore some of her key findings, and examine some of the benefits and challenges of conducting this form of social research. It is open to all, but intended primarily for the benefit of students studying DD215 Social Research: Crime, Justice and Society, as well as students studying qualifications that sit within the School of Social Sciences and Global Sciences more broadly. 

Short biographies

Speaker: Professor Alpa Shah is professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and leads a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute on Global Economies of Care. Her book Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerillas (2019) was awarded the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the New India Foundation Book Prize. She is also the author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-first Century India. 

Discussant: Dr Ece Kocabıçak is currently working as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at The Open University. Her research engages with contemporary debates in comparative sociology, feminist political economy, and international development. Her expertise is on the ways in which varieties of gender regimes diversify the trajectories of capitalist development, state formation and civil society in the global South; and the interactions between the patriarchal, capitalist and racist collective subjects. Ece is the author of The Political Economy of Patriarchy in the Global South, published by Routledge in 2022. 

Chair: Dr Keir Irwin-Rogers is a senior lecturer in Criminology at The Open University. His research focuses on the health, safety and well-being of young people. Keir is currently a Co-Investigator on an ESRC-funded project entitled Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction, which seeks to understand how best to reduce violence between young people. He recently co-authored the book, Against Youth Violence: A Social Harm Perspective, published by Bristol University Press in October 2022.