India’s Contemporary Urban Conundrum

Sujata Patel is National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. Earlier, she taught sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad and Pune and SNDT Women’s University. Her work is influenced by Marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post-structuralism, and covers areas such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, city-formation, social movements, gender construction, reservation, quota politics and caste and class formations in India. She is also an interlocutor of teaching and learning practices, and has written on the challenges that organise its reconstitution within classrooms and university structures. She is the author of over sixty peer-reviewed papers/book chapters and the Series Editor of Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society and Routledge’s Cities and the Urban Imperative. From 2010 to 2015, she edited the Sage Studies in International Sociology and Current Sociology Monographs. She is also the author of The Making of Industrial Relations (1997), editor of The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (2010) and Doing Sociology in India, Genealogies, Locations and Practices (2011) and is co-editor of five books: Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India (1995), Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (1995), Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (2003), Thinking Social Science in India (2002) and Urban Studies (2006). She has been associated in various capacities with the International Sociological Association and has been its first Vice-President for National Associations (2002–6). She was the President of Indian Sociological Society from January 2016 to December 2017.

Omita Goyal is presently Chief Editor of the IIC Quarterly, the Journal of the India International Centre, New Delhi, India. She started her career in the voluntary sector with the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, and then moved into academic publishing where she has spent over 27 years. She worked at Sage Publications India Private Limited for 20 years, leaving as General Manager, and thereafter was a consultant for the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, Voluntary Health Association of India, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, WHO, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and TERI. In 2005, she was invited by Taylor and Francis Group to start a social science programme under the social science and humanities imprint, Routledge, as Publishing Director. She has a master’s degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics.