Maitrayee Deka is an academic, poet and writer at the University of Essex. Her research is in social theory, STS and economic sociology. Maitrayee's book, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. It ethnographically elaborated on the Braudelian middle layer of the market economy to assess sustainable forms of social reproduction without clear-cut capitalist tendencies. Her current research is on the Whitechapel Market in London, looking at marketplaces as intellectual places and drawing from the literature on public space and autonomist Marxism. Maitrayee's new research explores spaces of Gen Z's social media to frame their worldview in a changing world. The first leg of this research was in Guwahati, where the everyday life of social media through multiple platforms gave an overview of young adults' concerns, collecting impressions from the local society and the global temporality of social media. Her poetry book Boiled or Cracked and the novel The Octogenarian will be out with Eastern Book House. In her creative and scholarly work, increasingly Maitrayee sees subjects, including the self, as a surface that reveals fissures, especially at a time when places for collective deliberation, joy and solidarity confront the neoliberal agenda of self-aggrandisement in all spheres of life.
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Contact
Email: maitrayee.deka@essex.ac.uk
Latest Publication
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The Petty Bourgeoisie: What is its Political Potential? The Political Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13466
Latest Talks
The Subtle World of Brands, Forthcoming Keynote, Workshop: Social Life of Brands, University of Naples, 27-28, June 2025
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Digital Labour, Game of Tech, Naples 9 April 2025
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Rough Work
Professional Interests
Maitrayee is the Co-Director for the Centre for Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI) at Essex. In this role, she is keen to include conversations and voices that make the global world political by critically exploring what it means to live together in a fragile planetary system. In an academic space, Maitrayee is closer to approaches that bring new perspectives from the most quotidian to complex issues and how often open dialogues introduce negotiation, intellectual rigour and healing spaces. Maitrayee is drawn to experimental and speculative thinking deeply rooted in subjective points of view.
Teaching
Maitrayee teaches social theory modules at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her teaching focuses on rethinking the classics and including new theoretical and historical perspectives from geographies and formerly marginalised ideas."Modernity" emerges as a key concept through which a global world is imagined and lived--Who has historically claimed to be modern, when does being modern become problematic and why (if at all) do we need to engage with the concept. The seminars are designed to be interactive and review the role of critical thinking in contemporary times from the students' standpoint.