Scripting Defiance - Four Sociological Vignettes

This is the second volume from the authors (along with several others) of Gauging and Engaging Deviance, which is positioned between the ideas of deviance and defiance and attempts to uncover scripts through which notions of deviance as well as acts of defiance unravel. It argues that instead of the monologue about the binary of European modernity and its traditional backwoods, the contours are to be found in another archive, one that is made up of significant scripts or narratives of defiance that endure through subaltern people’s cultural formations despite and in response to dominant ideas and ideologies. Such scripts within this archive will help sociology reconstitute itself away from its original mandate: to be part of the fixers, to help the maintenance of social order, to predict and control aberrant behaviour and to create functional individuals and ensembles. The chapters look at specific figures of discontent: the worker, the woman, the student, the artist, the migrant and refugee, the prisoner, and, as a counter-voice, the movements of reaction to their discontent, the movements of authoritative restoration.

is an academic and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in economics, development studies and popular music studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi over a period of three decades, and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs). She is also a visiting professor at Ashoka University, the University of Cape Town and the Institute for Human Development, Delhi. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s resulted in a book titled The Radical Impulse: Music and Politics in the IPTA Tradition (2017) and the album Songs of Protest. She has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in India and abroad. She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, and has also directed a multi-institutional project around music and migration in pre-colonial AfroAsia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a book titled Maps of Sorrow: Migration and Music in the Construction of Pre-Colonial AfroAsia (2023).