Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Venue: Zoom (online) – Zoom link to be provided after registration

Speaker: Dr. Romit Chowdhury (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Moderator: Dr. Tangi PC YIP (Postdoctoral Fellow, Gender Research Centre, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, CUHK)

Abstract: 

In Indian cities, near all public transport workers are men. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely how masculinities mediate urban public transportation in the city. Based on my book – City of Men – this presentation gives an ethnographic account of autorickshaw and taxi operators in Kolkata. It locates certain ideals of masculinity – related to fatherhood, marriage, filial ties, heterosexuality, and family honour – as compelling social forces that mediate the social life of public transport in the city. While social geographers have long highlighted the value of thinking of masculinity and the home as co-constitutive, my book takes this symbiosis outside the threshold of the house to show how it conditions the urban outdoors. At the intersection of familial ideologies and masculine subjectivities, everyday morality and cooperation become motors for the gendered reproduction of mobilities in the city.

Speaker’s Biography: 

Romit Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is an urban sociologist working on masculinities, public transport, superdiversity, and everyday life in cities.

Language: English

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13697644