Preeti Sampat

Student Fellow

Preeti Sampat is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation examines land and resource rights and conflicts with respect to infrastructure and urbanization policy in India. With a legal ethnography of the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 that traces its policy genesis and successful resistance against its implementation in Goa, her research interrogates contemporary capital accumulation processes, infrastructure and urbanization policy, changing relations to land and resources, social movements, and negotiations of citizenship and the state refashioning the ‘rule of law’ in India’s ‘liberalizing’ democracy. Before joining the doctoral program at CUNY Preeti was an activist with the rural collective of peasants and workers in Rajasthan in India Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and worked on state and national campaigns for the Right to Information, Employment Guarantee for Rural Workers and the Right to Food.

Participating Years

2013–2014

Remaking Worlds: Insurgencies, Revolutions, Utopias

Building on the past two years of seminars devoted to the theme of “Uprisings” the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics will focus its upcoming 2013-2014 seminar on questions of insurgencies, revolutions, and utopias. We propose to examine each of these phenomena as ongoing processes rather than as singular historical, present, or forthcoming events.