Dr. Anu Sabhlok
Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences

Email anusabhlok(AT)iisermohali.ac.in
Phone +91 172 2293164
Fax +91 172 2240266
Personal Page                                                               
Research Area
Social Science
Research Focus

Critical perspectives on disaster relief- How do we define disasters and what does it mean to provide relief? How does the defining of disasters and the performance of relief produce place and construct subjects - as agents and as victims; as local, national or global; as providers and as receivers and so on. My ethnographic fieldwork on disaster relief reveals relief work and relief sites (camps) as spaces where subjectivities are dismantled, reproduced, and reconstructed; where international aid and local politics intersect; and where numerous discourses surrounding disasters and developments circulate and find roots. The idea is to go beyond a purely economic analysis of disaster relief and take the vulnerability analysis a step further to understand disasters and relief as socio-cultural and political processes.

- Gender and nationalism in the construction of border roads I am collecting life-stories of migrant workers that build roads in the remote reaches of India. The project intends to construct an ethnography weaving together the stories of these road builders with themes of nationalism, tourism, circular migration, gender and development.

Developing Participatory Action Research tools - I am collaborating with a Chandigarh based NGO, Center for Education and Voluntary Action (CEVA) to develop methods and tools that enable participatory approaches in qualitative research and social change.

Selected Publications
  • Marshall, G and Sabhlok, A . 2009. "Not for the Sake of Work": Ultra-religious women's spatial negotiations in Turkey and India. Women Studies International Forum 32(6).
  • Sabhlok, A and Newton, J. Book chapter 10. Middle-East. Address Earth, a Large Format Atlas project. American Printing House for the Blind. (forthcoming)
  • Sabhlok, Anu. 2008. Integrated Disaster Management: an incentive for interstate cooperation amongst states in India. Man and Development. Journal of the Center for Research in Rural and Industrial Development 30(4): 17-30.
  • Sabhlok, Anu. 2008. Book Review. Disaster Management in the wake of a flood. Punjab Geographer 4: 93-95.
    Co-author (283 collective). 2008. What's Just: afterthoughts on the Summer Institute for Geographies of Justice. Antipode 40(5): 736-750.