Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: None Given
rakaray@berkeley.edu
Raka Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She grew up in Calcutta, India, but has moved steadily west since then, receiving her AB from Bryn Mawr College, and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been at Berkeley since 1993.
Professor Ray’s areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, domination and inequality, cultures of servitude and social movements. Publications on social movements include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; and in India, Kali for Women, 2000), “Women’s Movements in the Third World: Identity, Mobilization and Autonomy” with Anna Korteweg (Annual Review of Sociology, 1999) and Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld, 2005).
She is at present writing a book titled Cultures of Servitude: The Making of a Middle Class in Calcutta and New York with co-author Seemin Qayum. Questions of elite and subaltern agency, subjectivity, and memory inform the book’s methodological and interpretive approach. Articles from that project include “Masculinity, Femininity And Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century” (Feminist Studies 2000), and (with Seemin Qayum) “Grappling with Modernity: Calcutta’s Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude” (Ethnography 2003).
