Anthropology Colloquium: Trishna Senapaty

 The Closed and the Open Prison: The Shifting Horizon of Carceral Reform in India 

Trishna Senapaty is PhD candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her PhD project examines the politics of prison reform and the intersections of carceral and familial regimes in postcolonial India. She studies everyday engagements between prisoners and citizen collectives and the forms of care, strategies of governance and imaginations of safety in the city that they illuminate. Her community-engaged research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council. It contributes to dialogues in critical critical carceral studies, queer and feminist studies, law and society, and political and legal anthropology.  

Prior to Cornell, she received a Masters and MPhil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics and a Bachelors in Literature from Miranda House, Delhi University. She is the co-founder of the Abolitionist Anthropology Working Group - a mutually supportive community of anthropologists invested in diverse anti-carceral scholarly and social justice work.