Dr Koyel Lahiri earned an MPhil and a PhD from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, granted by Jadavpur University. Her doctoral research, supported by fellowships from the ICSSR and DAAD, looked at informal workers in India and their politics at two sites of work: the hawker in the city and industrial workers at factories. The thesis was titled Experience, Aspirations and Organisation: Politics of informal workers in post-1990s India. She graduated with a B.A. Honours in English (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University) and has an M.A. in Globalisation and Labour (a former Global Labour University programme at TISS, Mumbai).

She is currently developing her first book project, drawing from the PhD research. While holding on to the ethnographically generated details of the two cases studied and the central argument that a worker’s politics stems from their threefold relationship with work-i.e. With work at the worksite, and the social and selfhood aspects of the working experience- she is trying to expand the scope of how she can read the latter two registers of that relationship.

This includes contemplating epistemological frameworks, and thinking through the methodological possibilities for academic meaning making so that it can draw from multiple analytic and epistemological frameworks. For example, can the poetic, intuitive understanding of work as ‘purpose’ (as opposed to work as ‘job’) be included in an academic text alongside a political economic discussion around work? Can we hold together the material and the ephemeral with equal elegance and rigour? The goal is to arrive at a kind of knowledge, in the manuscript, that feels both grounded and ‘true’; and intuitively persuasive, and in so doing, making it relevant to the building of a meaningful workers’ movement that is able to speak to the multiple cascading urgencies of the present.