Sreeparna ChattopadhyayFoundation for Liberal And Management Education | FLAME · Sociology
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
Doctor of Philosophy
Associate Professor, Sociology, FLAME University, Pune
About
50
Publications
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213
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Dr. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay conducts research in the areas of Gender Studies, Health, Family/Kinship and Gender-Based Violence using anthropological methods and theory. Her most recent project explored factors affecting maternal health in Assam. She has also worked in applied research and uses mixed-methods in her research. Currently, she is working on discourses of respectful maternal care for users of private medical care in India.
Additional affiliations
October 2021 - present
February 2020 - June 2020
October 2018 - July 2019
Education
August 2001 - May 2007
Publications
Publications (50)
In this chapter I interrogate the utility of the term obstetric violence in the Indian
context using ethnographic insights from research conducted between 2015 and 2019 in
two geographically distinct areas of India as well as the scholarship on obstetric violence,
disrespect and abuse and respectful maternity care. I argue that the circumstances un...
Thalassemia is an inherited blood disorder that has been receiving increasing attention in India. However, prevention of thalassemia in India continues to be difficult despite efforts of public health professionals and the government. Using West Bengal as a case study, this paper attempts to unravel some of the barriers to the prevention campaign a...
Although India's divorce rate is low in cross-national perspective, the separation rate is three times as large as the divorce rate. There is striking variation across states, with marriage dissolution lower in the North compared with the South and North-east, consistent with previous arguments regarding relative female autonomy across regions. Sur...
The majority of maternal health interventions in India focus on increasing institutional deliveries to reduce maternal mortality, typically by incentivising village health workers to register births and making conditional cash transfers to mothers for hospital births. Based on over 15 months of ethnographically informed fieldwork conducted between...
Marital sexual violence is a serious problem in India. However, marital rape and most other forms of marital sexual violence are not criminalized in the country. This qualitative study with 10 healthcare providers (physicians and nurses), lawyers, members of a non-profit organization that offers domestic violence support services out of a hospital,...
Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is an ambitious and insightful intellectual history of the concept of the prostitute in colonial India. Mitra uncovers the material, legal, medical and discursive practices by which deviant female sexuality became the primary ‘grid’ through which disciplinary...
This study suggests that compared to NFHS-3, in NFHS-5, justification for wife-beating in most southern Indian states has increased or remained the same despite increasing prosperity, levels of female education, and better indicators of human development in the region. While the reasons for why this has occurred against the backdrop of improved con...
Institutional births increased in India from 39% to 79% between 2005 and 2015. Drawing from 17 months of fieldwork, this article traces the shift from home to hospital births across three generations in a hamlet in Assam in Northeast India. Here, too, one finds that most births have shifted from home to hospital in less than a decade, aided by mult...
Accountability has often been viewed as a mechanism to identify something that has gone amiss, blame the perpetrator, and punish them. Freedman (2003) proposes a different view of accountability that she terms constructive accountability which concerns itself with “…developing a dynamic of entitlement and obligation between people and their governm...
In this essay, I use the concepts of shadows (Leibing and McLean, 2007) and prisms (Richardson 2000), in an attempt to render an honest and personal account of the topography of suffering, with its contours of grief, loss, and anguish in the context of doing fieldwork and writing about marital violence in India. I reflect on my own shadows in relat...
Assam has reported the highest rate of crimes against women among all states and union territories for the last three consecutive years for which official data are available. There has been a marked increase in three categories of crimes against women--domestic violence, kidnapping and molestation--from 2016 to 2019, according to National Crime Rec...
Issues of sexual violence or any form of forced or nonconsensual sexual interactions, whether in marital or nonmarital, heteronormative or queer, long-term or otherwise relationships, are most commonly understood as issues of consent. This chapter demonstrates how normative and discursive practices shape the interdependence between sexual violence...
Marriage and intimacy, desire and violence, are simultaneously embedded in global capital
and technology flows as they are in cultures of countries and communities. Countries like
India are experiencing tectonic shifts in norms and practices, thanks to easy access to
technology. This offers opportunities to young people to explore their sexuality,...
This paper addresses a critical concern in realizing sexual and reproductive health and rights through policies and programs – the relationship between power and accountability. We examine accountability strategies for sexual and reproductive health and rights through the lens of power so that we might better understand and assess their actual work...
While marital rape is not criminalised in India, some forms of marital sexual violence are brought under the ambit of current domestic violence laws. This presentation tries to highlight the role of health systems in assisting survivors of marital sexual violence in seeking legal redress. Using a feminist perspective, it argues that while health sy...
Published by the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47025662
While India's #MeToo has taken off in fits and starts, it has still not touched the lives of millions of poor, vulnerable women who work in informal jobs. Meena (her name has been changed on request) is a 45-year-old domestic worker in the southern city of Bangalore. And she i...
In India, most women who experience domestic violence do not share their experience with anybody or seek help. Among those who do, a “pyramid of reporting” exists. Informal sources (natal family and friends) are favoured; very few report violence via institutional routes (non-governmental organisations and police). The conditions under which incide...
In India, most women who experience domestic violence do not share their experience with anybody or seek help. Among those who do, a “pyramid of reporting” exists. Informal sources (natal family and friends) are favoured; very few report violence via institutional routes (non-governmental organisations and police). The conditions under which incide...
Institutional births in India have increased from 39% in 2005-06 to 79% in 2014-15. In the state of Assam, in Northeast India where this study is located births in hospitals have increased from 22.4% in 2005-06 to 70.6%, of which over 60% are in state facilities. This paper draws from 17 months of fieldwork in rural Assam with 24 young women who ga...
Institutional births in India, including the north eastern state of Assam, have increased steeply in the last decade such that 71% of all births now occur in facilities. Most analyses of disrespect and abuse during childbirth have largely framed the problem within a binary that juxtaposes all users of services in one category, subordinate to instit...
While getting girls into school, is necessary it is not sufficient to manifest the transformative potential of education. The curriculum needs to have gender equity embedded within it. We argue that it is possible to address the drop-outs of girls from secondary education through a change of gender-inequitable norms and practices such as the early...
In March 2017, the Law Commission of India published its 267th report on “Hate Speech,” which recognised gender-based hate speech and recommended criminalising it along with other forms of hate speech. In September 2017, an expert committee constituted by the Government of India adopted the commission’s recommendation and made suggestions to reflec...
Neither Safe Nor Dignified As part of its commitment to reduce maternal mortality, the government of India has actively promoted institutional deliveries along with several other health system reforms. Conditional cash transfers, mobilisation through village-level health workers or Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and mandatory outreach cl...
Reproductive rights should not be narrowly understood only as the right to have safe abortions. It is the right of all couples and individuals to freely and responsibly decide how many children they/she should have, how they should space them, and when they should have it as well as access to enough information and the means to make those decisions...
The goal of this essay is to reflect on the pedagogical learnings, areas of contestation and consensus, and development of students’ own understandings of gender equity during a semester long PG course on Gender and Development. Employing an explicitly feminist approach and assessment strategies including curating visual essays, asking students to...
Domestic violence is a serious issue in India with 37% of women reporting being beaten at some
point in their lives in national surveys. While this is likely to be an undercount given the stigma
associated with intimate partner violence and women’s lack of access to the justice system, it is
noteworthy that conviction rates continue to be extremely...
At the heart of the Samata intervention is the development of a cadre of adolescent girl leaders who will sustain changes in favour of girls’ education and gender equality in their villages. The programme mentors girls to become confident and vocal young feminists, active in their communities and schools. Samata aims to equip them with the knowledg...
The Samavedana Plus Program (KHPT and STRIVE project) provides individual and couple counselling and holds workshops for the intimate partners (IPs) of female sex workers (FSWs). It aims to make men more sensitive and responsible in their relationships and treat the sex workers with respect as equals.
Samvedana Plus engages with local community leaders, residents, family members and self-help groups to design sustainable ways to prevent violence, raise awareness about domestic violence, create networks of support and action within the community and advocate for women’s rights. Community dialogue, street plays, folk shows and stakeholder meetings...
Samvedana Plus is designed to understand and address violence and hiV risk in the intimate partnerships of Female Sex Workers. The baseline survey of FSWs found that close to 51% experienced some form of violence from their partners. about 66% believed violence in their intimate relationships to be justified if it was for the sake of the children o...
As one important way to prevent intimate partner violence, Samvedana Plus seeks to strengthen the community-based organisations (CBOs) of female sex workers in order to:
recognise this form of violence against members, stand together against partner violence
and strengthen its own systems to stop this violence. In the Bagalkot district of North Kar...
Families, communities and village governments are often the key decision-makers regarding girls’ lives. They can also be the most difficult to persuade in terms of delaying girls’ marriages. Their support can ensure that changes initiated by Samata in rural North Karanataka are sustained well after the end of the programme.
Samata works with 64 schools across 49 villages in two districts of Bagalkot and Bijapur in northern Karnataka. teachers and members of the School development management committee (SDMC) are given gender training, as they are key stakeholders in transforming schools into gender-responsive teaching and learning environments.The Samata programme team...
Safe yet violent? Experiences With Institutional Births Among Women In Assam, India
In India, the zeal to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reduction of maternal mortality has led to an obsessive emphasis on promoting institutional delivery. Several health system reforms in the last decade have sought to bring all pregnant women under stat...
Nationally, more than a third of women report some form of domestic violence in India. This study set in a Mumbai slum shows that structural violence contributes to domestic violence and also systematically disadvantages women by forcing them to drop out of school, reduces labour force participation and prevents women from leaving abusive marriages...
Paper presented at a conference organized by the Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT) in Dharwad, Karnataka 20th-21st June 2015 with a special focus on interventions to reduce girls' dropouts at the secondary school level. Emphasis on Northeast Karnataka.
A 2007 Government of India study indicated that every 2nd child in India has been sexually abused. More recently there have been several newspaper reports of abuse of children in schools in major Indian cities. We argue that child sexual abuse needs to be situated within the larger context of physical and emotional abuse of children, the absence of...
Sreeparna Ghosh Violence against women in India has recently been brought to the world's attention. But for too long the problem has been under reported. This column looks at what the data can tell us. A recent G20 survey ranked India as the worst place to be a woman (Baldwin 2012). Female foeticide, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and other...
Anthropological Encounters with Intimate Partner Violence: Reflections on our roles in advocating for a safer world Special Issue in Practicing Anthropology
Abstract
On a warm October day in 2005, I attended a state level conference on preventing violence against women in Mumbai. The speakers included state (Maharashtra) and national level administrative officials, representatives of the UN and the UNFPA, social workers and members of several NGOs. One of the speakers, a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ministry...
The purpose of this paper is to articulate the roles of families in the prevention, mitigation or exacerbation of domestic violence in the Indian context. Data for this paper has been collected during 2004-05 using ethnographic methods (interviews and observations) with 52 women ( 8 mother-daughter pairs) and 20 men and their families living in the...
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the marital unit as a significant locus for transmission of HIV/STD for women throughout the world, there has been little effort to explore the factors in marital relationships that are associated with transmission or prevention. Data for this paper was collected through a structured survey and STD testing of bo...
Projects
Projects (9)
Marriage and parenthood are perceived to be universal in the Indian context. This project seeks to understand the motivations behind why some urban couples or individuals may choose to not have biological children in India. This project uses ethnographic techniques such as interviews, observations, analysis of memes, digital micronarratives, imagery, and text.
A discursive analysis of respectful maternal care in India from the perspective of users of private care
