CrimSL warmly welcomes our new postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Taveeshi Singh!
Taveeshi completed her PhD in Syracuse University's Social Science Doctoral Program at the Maxwell School. She holds a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Women’s & Gender Studies from Syracuse University. She received a MA in Psychology in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA (Honours) in Psychology from Delhi University.
Her doctoral dissertation, Domestic Exertions: Soldier-servants, Military Elites, and Securitized Labor in India, explores the politics of gender, labor, value, and national security through an examination of the postcolonial Indian army’s sahayak system (formerly, the colonial “batman” system) in which combatant soldiers are coerced into performing domestic chores in officers’ households.
Taveeshi's work at CrimSL, "Theorizing Soldiers as Military Workers: Labor, Law, and Activism in the Contemporary Indian Army," will be supervised by Professor Beatrice Jauregui. She says she aims to "expand on my research on military labour to develop an ethnographic understanding of Indian Army soldiers’ subjectivities as military workers." She explains:
This involves investigating how soldiers see themselves as rights-bearing workers, their mobilizations for workplace equity and justice, and their treatment in army law as exceptional citizens without recourse to civil labor law. Typically, army law is wielded by military advocates embedded in the same class and rank structure as the military elites imbricated in misusing the sahayak system, as demonstrated by Swades Deepak’s critically acclaimed Hindi language military courtroom drama Court Martial, performed across India and Pakistan.
My new project will draw on a rich collection of ethnographic, legal, and literary sources, including interviews with military veteran activists, military law experts, Armed Forces Tribunal judgments, Ministry of Defense reports, and the Court Martial playscript. It will extend theorizations about regimes of truth, justice, and humanness into the workings of security institutions in South Asia and globally, ultimately enabling us to understand them as sites that monopolize violence and produce human constraint, and reflect the complexities and contradictions of human struggles against structural injustice.
My fellowship period will be devoted to collecting and analyzing new data and writing up my research findings as an article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal in the field of critical security studies.
Taveeshi's research and teaching have earned her numerous awards and honours, including the NEH Faculty of Color Working Group Fellowship and the Diane Lynden Murphy Bread and Roses Award for Activism, Syracuse University. She has received funding from the Mellon Foundation and the National Women’s Studies Association, among others.
She is co-editor of the Feminist Freedom Warriors project, an online archive documenting cross-generational conversations about justice, politics, and hope with feminist scholar-activists.
Taveeshi was a Visiting Instructor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Hamilton College in 2020-2021.
She plans to make the most of her time at CrimSL. She says:
"Professor Beatrice Jauregui’s singular expertise on transnational security, labor, and law, and the postcolonial Indian context, combined with the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies’ unparalleled resources, will provide me with the careful and rigorous guidance and support I am seeking to develop this cutting edge, new research, and ultimately in advancing my goal of a tenure-track academic career."
She will join Hamilton College as Assistant Professor of Race/Transnational Feminism in their the Department of Women's and Gender Studies in 2025 after spending a year with us.
Please join us in giving Taveeshi a warm CrimSL welcome!