(Associate Researcher, since August 2020 – present)

Biography:

Sneha Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, India, and an associate member of the CSH. She has worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher based at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi, India focusing on commercial surrogacy in the European Research Council funded project “Laws of Social Reproduction” which is hosted by the King’s College London. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Delhi (2018-19), and has been a recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship at postdoctoral level at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zürich (2017-18).

She completed her Ph.D at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2016. Her research deploys a feminist lens to focus on the phenomenon of commercial surrogacy and its emergence as an industry in India aided by reproductive technologies and a permissive legal environment. More recently, as the Indian state shifted gears from legalization to prohibition, her research engages with the regulation of commercial surrogacy as an instance that offers critical keys to understanding how states regulate reproduction and reproductive labor. She has also worked with the New Delhi based non-governmental organisation, Sama Resource Group for Women and Health (2016-17), in a research and advocacy role with a focus on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) in general, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies & surrogacy in particular.