Introducing: Shubhra Sharma

Shubhra Sharma joined the Connecticut College faculty in 2010 as the Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. At Connecticut College, Shubhra teaches courses on transnational women’s movements and feminist ethnography such as “Chutney-Popcorn: Bollywood, Globalization, and Social Reform,” and “Traveling as Feminist.” Before coming to Connecticut College, Shubhra served as Associate Director and Senior Lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a research fellowship with the Global Feminisms Collaborative at Vanderbilt University. Shubhra’s first book, “Neoliberalization” as Betrayal: State, Feminism, and a Women’s Education Program in India, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Here, she analyzes how feminism as expertise played an important role in translating the “woman condition” into the “woman question” for the purposes of governance (by national and transnational authorities); how feminism as expertise displayed a form of “disciplining politics” vis-à-vis women “who will not articulate their needs in political terms”; and how subjectivities constituted through a form of “disciplining politics” challenge such politics in discourse and practices of everyday life. Shubhra uses betrayal as an allegory of/ for such challenges and tells many stories of such betrayal in context (Chitrakoot and Delhi, India). Currently Shubhra is examining the shifting (or not) nature of imaginations about self, family, and nation amongst the Indian diaspora community in Canada, especially those who have migrated there from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to understand what constitutes the linchpin of cultural identity building within this community in its transnational movement. Shubhra has also worked as a research anthropologist for a cutting-edge design firm based in Dallas, TX. She currently resides in New York City with her partner.