Biography:

Satish Deshpande currently teaches at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.  Previously, he has worked at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Institute of Economic Growth (both in Delhi), and the University of Hyderabad.  He began his academic career as a teacher of Economics but abandoned his first doctoral thesis for another in Sociology.  He is the author of Contemporary India: A Sociological View (Viking Penguin 2003), which was translated into Malayalam and excerpted in Hindi and Marathi.  He has co-authored, edited and coedited books on caste; Hindu-Muslim violence; inclusion in Indian higher education; the disciplinary history of Indian sociology and social anthropology; and untouchability in contemporary rural India.  His research interests include caste and class inequalities in India; higher education today; the history and politics of the social sciences; issues of language in academia; and contemporary social theory.  He is happy that, to the best of his knowledge, he is not on any social media platforms.

Recent Publications:

• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Constructing ‘the people in India today”, in Seminar n.756, pp.62-66.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022.  “Democratizing higher education in the twenty-first century: The road beyond access”, in D.D. Nampoothiri, T.Y. Vinod Krishnan, Ashley Paul and Anoop Jayaprakash (eds), Nationhood, Social Justice and Unequal Transformations: Essays for K.R. Narayanan, Delhi, Primus Books,  pp.115-127.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Representations of electoral politics: Notes on the conceptual career of the ‘vote bank’”, in Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha (eds), Political Imaginaries in Twentieth Century India, London, Bloomsbury, pp.181-97.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Foreword: Politics and the People”, in Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur (eds), The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21^st Century, Penguin Viking, pp.xxv-xxix.
• Deshpande Satish, 2021. “Shiksha, gyaan aur samaj ka samkaal”, interview (with Ramashanker Singh, in Hindi) in Samajiki, Praveshaank (inaugural issue), pp.105-18.