Manjusha Nair

Associate Professor

Globalization, Political Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Development, Decolonizing Methods, Postcolonialism, Labor Movements, India, China, Ethiopia, South Africa

I completed my PhD in sociology from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 2011 and joined the National University of Singapore, as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Sociology. After six years of teaching in Asia, I moved in Fall 2017 to the United States as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, the largest public research university in Virginia. Currently, I am the Director of the Global South Research Hub, the Associate Editor of Pacific Affairs for South Asia and the Himalayas, and a Justice 21 Committee member of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/handbook-of-social-justice-in-the-global-south-9781803921143.html

The enquiry that has framed all my research so far has been the possibilities and limitations of the counter hegemonic processes that challenge neoliberal globalization in the Global South. This enquiry has placed my research projects at the intersection of political sociology, political economy, and development. While anchored in my experience of Indian postcolonial society, my explorations have reached out to study it in comparison with China and transnational relations with Africa. Most of my work has been to see the global social forces shaping and shaped by micro-foundations of social life and to see the global connectedness of geographies. Methodologically, I am a historical and comparative sociologist who looks for answers to the present by tracing historical processes. I generate evidence from historical sources and ethnographic research. All my projects involve field research in the Global South. I have been consistently successful in obtaining financial assistance to complete my research projects and in publishing these works in academic outlets.

My award-winning book, Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India, published by SUNY Press in 2016, shows, systematically, how neoliberal globalization, mediated as market fundamentalism and right-wing politics in India, has weakened the ability of rural migrant workers to use democratic forms of contention, ranging from negotiations to strikes and social movements.

My research on rural protests and land politics in India and China focuses on the similarities in regime responses to popular struggles, which could not be explained using regime types. This work draws on moral economy literature to suggest a new kind of politics among the dispossessed in India, based on community solidarities and often using and subverting the neoliberal market template.

My current research is on Africa-India relations. The Indian Ocean networks, which emerged in 800 BC, connected Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through the movement of objects, cultures, ideas, and people. These networks involved social exchanges that went beyond the market and showed ways of co-existing in this world that were more reciprocal than stratified. They were interrupted by Western colonialism from the 16th century, under which the Indian Ocean became a conduit in the circuits of capital and commodities. Yet historians argue that the myriad of circulations across the ocean continued creating an often unsettled, but organic community between India and Africa, at least in the port cities. With the end of colonization, though there were efforts to envision postcolonial solidarities based on past connections, many nations and regions aspired to be with the West and its ideologies of progress. Under the aegis of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, there is once again a flurry of movements between India and Africa, across the Indian Ocean. What forms do these movements take? What exchanges and reciprocities do they engage in? What possibilities of solidarities and communities do they create? These questions form the basis of my second book project, A Crisscross World: Africa, India, and the Indian Ocean Present.

Selected Publications

Books

(Manuscript in Preparation) A Crisscross World: Africa, India, and the Indian Ocean Present.

2025 (Forthcoming) Handbook of Social Justice in the Global South, Co-edited with Nikhil Deb and Glenn W. Muschert, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

2016 Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India, NY: Albany: State University of New York Press, Global Modernity Series. Honorable Mention, Global Division Book Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2018.

Book Chapters, Articles, and Other Publications:

2025 (Forthcoming) Nair, Manjusha. “Thinking Beyond Capitalism in India and Africa: Global South Possibilities,” Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South, edited by Anne Garland Mahler, Christoper J. Lee, and Monica Popescu. UK: Oxford University Press.

2022 Nair, Manjusha, "Interweaving Afro-Asian Solidarity: A Global Textile Factory Floor in Ethiopia," in Gowri Vijayakumar and Smitha Radhakrishnan edited book, Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries, pp. 177-204. Springer.

2021 Nair, Manjusha, and Eli Friedman. "Regimes, Resistance and Reforms: Comparing Workers' Politics in the Automobile Industry in China and India." Global Labour Journal 12, no. 1.

2020 Nair, Manjusha. The View from the Factory Floor, Africa is a Country, https://africasacountry.com/2020/10/the-view-from-the-factory-floor

Translated into Italian, https://thebottomup.it/2020/11/09/etiopia-fabbrica-transizione-economia-sussistenza-industrializzazione/

2019 Nair, Manjusha. “Land as a Transactional Asset: Moral Economy and Market Logic in Contested Land Acquisition in India.” Development and Change 51(6): 1511–1532

2018 Nair, Manjusha, “State-Embedded Villages: Rural Protests and Rights Awareness in India and China,” in Prasenjit Duara and Elizabeth Perry edited book, Beyond Regime Type: China and India Compared, Harvard University Press, Chapter 4

2018 Nair, Manjusha. “Delivering a Global India: Capital Flows and Development Dilemmas in South Africa’s Mining Zones.” Economic and Political Weekly, 53(46):52-59.

Current PhD Students

Blake Vullo, Between Privilege and Precarity: Environmental Change, Land Use Change, and Sub/Urban Housing Development in the United States, 2001-2016.

Deepika Hooda, Rethinking marginalization: A qualitative study of highly skilled migration, a case of Indian IT workers in the US.

Omer Pacal, The Market of Hegemony: The state formation in Turkey’s eastern frontier in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sevil Suleymani, Outsiders Within Their Homeland: The Racialized Self and the Limits of Western-Centrism.

Courses Taught

Globalization, Decolonizing Methods, Gender and Society, Sociology of Development, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Social Movements, Sociology of Power, Social Theory

Dissertations Supervised

Sevil Suleymani, Nationalism, Racialization, and the Politics of Inclusion: The Case of Turks in Iran (1828-1940) (2025)

Rasmieyh Abdelnabi, A Gendered Politics of Life: The Feminization of Resistance, Social Reproduction, Palestinian Embroidery–women’s Work Toward Surviving and Thriving (2024)