Dr Preeti Sampat holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining Krea University, she was a faculty member at Dr B R Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her work broadly examines the social relations around nature, state and capital in India. Her research interests include several overlapping thematic clusters: land, infrastructure and urbanisation; capital, value and economic growth; the metabolics of nature and labour; caste and rent; and state, sovereignty and social movements. She has contributed book chapters, research papers and reports, and media articles along these themes in national and international publications. As part of an Engaged Anthropology grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation, Dr. Sampat has curated the Living Histories of Land in Goa Mobile Museum.
Dr Sampat’s forthcoming co-edited volume, Unsettling Land (University Press of Colorado), examines land and its affordances relationally. The volume brings together anthropologists and geographers studying land relations in diverse historically mediated sociomaterial contexts across the globe. The volume contributes insights from relational ethnographic practice, for contemporary politics. Dr Sampat is currently finalising research articles and a monograph based on her long-term ethnographic and archival work on what she terms ‘growth infrastructures,’ the value relations of land rent, and their implications for land rights and economic growth in India.
Dr Sampat’s recent research fellowships and grants include an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellowship at the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester; a Wenner-Gren Foundation Workshop Grant; a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative, The Graduate Center, CUNY; a Wenner-Gren Foundation Engaged Anthropology Grant; and a Public Policy Scholarship with The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Chennai.
Prior to her PhD, Dr Sampat lived and worked in rural Rajasthan as a member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan for several years, working on issues such as the right to information, employment guarantee and food security.
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