Devika Singh Shekhawat

Education

• PhD Scholar in Sociology, Dr B.R. Ambedkar University, School of Liberal Studies, New Delhi, India (ongoing)
• Visiting Research Fellow, Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the South Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2023-2024)
• Masters in Sociology, Centre of Studies of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India (2017 to 2019)
• Bachelor of Arts, History and Political Science, University of Delhi, St. Stephens College, Delhi, India (2014 to 2017)

Profile

Devika is a medical anthropologist, researcher, and university educator studying health and labour relations within tea plantations of northeast India. Her research contributes to the interdisciplinary debates across global public health, anthropology, and rural sociology by understanding how health and labour relations reproduce the plantation landscapes of 21st-century Assam.

She has written on the history and memory of indenture in tea plantations in Assam and the ecological crisis of shrimp aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study the rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation, and labour relations in northeast India.

Research Interests

• Gender and labour studies
• Public health
• Migration studies
• Developmental issues

Publications

• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2025) forthcoming “Lal Saa (Black tea), Seto pani (White discharge): Diet and Work in the tea plantations of Assam and Darjeeling”, Sociological Bulletin, Sage Publication Journal
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2024) Book Review of ‘The work of repair: Capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa By Thomas Cousins, New York: Fordham University Press. 2023. 320 pp.’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12898
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2023) “ASHA Workers Holding the Last Sickle for Public Healthcare in Tea Plantations of Assam” in ‘Pandemic and Precarity’, (ed,) Rituparna Dutta, Manairban Calcutta Research Centre, Sampark Publication, Kolkota
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2022) “Health of Tea Plantation Workers during Covid-19: The Role of ASHA Workers”, in ‘Inequalities as Sources of Conflicts; The Case of Covid-19’, (ed.) Joseph Zoliana, North East Social Research Centre, NESRC Peace Series-18, Guwahati
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2022) “Encountering the Digital- Jhumur Folk songs, Memory, Migration and the Digital”, Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India (eds) Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India
  https://www.routledge.com/Literary-Cultures-and-Digital-Humanities-in-India/Zaidi-Pue/p/book/9781032406756
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2021) “Prisons Should Not Be Turned Into Death Sentences.”, conditions of India’s Prisons during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Akademi Magazine, 14 May 2021. https://www.akademimag.com/prison-death-sentence-covid19
• Shekhawat, Devika Singh, (2020) “Axom Deshor Bagisare Sowali: The Girl from the Tea Gardens of Assam” Essays From the North East. Zubaan Publications, New Delhi. https://zubaanprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SPF-2019-Grant-Papers_Devika-Singh-Shekhawat_Axom-D eshor-Bagisare-Sowali.pdf
• Pattnaik, Ananya, Shekhawat, Devika S., (2020) “Shrimp Aquaculture Ecological Decline and the Spectre of NRC” in Occupation of the Coast: II The puzzle of shrimp production on the East Coast of India. The Research Collective, Programme of Social Action, New Delhi. http://www.psa-india.net/publications