Dr. Tanay Gandhi

Profile

I am a critical political theorist with research interests in post-foundational political thought, aesthetics, and postcolonial theory with a focus on practices of resistance and questions of democratic subjectivity in postcolonial India. My research is particularly concerned with the intersections between South Asian political thought, Black studies and postcolonial theory, all anchored in a commitment to the 'primacy of practice' and a 'rearguard' role for the work of theory. Current research focuses on postcolonial India, identifying practices of unruliness as a medium of radical democratic politics that problematise an orderly image of the postcolonial subject.

Prior to my current role, I was lecturer (part-time) at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton. My doctoral research project, also at the University of Southampton was titled ‘Insurgent India(s): unruly bodies, fugitive experience and democratic possibility’ (supervisors: Prof. David Owen, Dr. Clare Woodford; examiners: Prof. Davide Panagia, Prof. Chris Armstrong).

My first degree is in law and from 2017 to 2019, I was Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, India. There, I designed and led participatory action-research interventions on indigenous land tenure rights, self-governance and participatory democracy, police brutality, caste atrocities, access to justice, and community-based transformative justice practices.

Research interests

My research is particularly concerned with the intersections between South Asian political thought, Black studies and postcolonial theory, all anchored in a commitment to the 'primacy of practice' and a 'rearguard' role for the work of theory. My work is current focused on the connections across two aesthetic-political problematics in postcolonial India: unruliness as a genre of radical democratic politics, and - through such genre - the evocation of a distinctly Indian vernacular of the politics of refusal. Recent publications on this theme include Rhythms of Dalit Refusal in the poetry of Namdeo Dhasal (Paragraph 2026) and Dam(n)med Bodies: disorderly subjectivity and sublime experience in the Narmada Movement (Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, 2024).

I am also interested in critical pedagogical approaches to teaching politics - in HE contexts and beyond. My teaching practice and pedagogical research draw on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed and M. K. Gandhi's Nai Talim with the aim of making the teaching of politics (and political theory in particular) a process of individual and communal transformation.