Urmitapa Dutta

I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Grounded in Global South feminist decolonial praxis, my work seeks to understand and disrupt normalized everyday violence (direct, structural, and symbolic) across the spaces I am rooted in, and those that I transgress. My decolonial praxis is profoundly shaped by my experiences growing up in the Northeastern borderlands of India, amidst complex and convoluted forms of belonging, marginality, and exclusions. . Working transnationally, I use critical qualitative methodologies to interrogate the linkages between epistemic violence and myriad forms of domination codified by (settler) colonial modes of knowledge production. I approach decolonial praxis as a powerful mode of centering lived realities and voices of communities at the margins of national and global imaginaries. My community-engaged activist scholarship (re)centers Global South and majority world peoples as epistemic subjects or knowledge producers. I engage in collaborative research, teaching, community action, and multivocal writing from relationally rooted places that contend with complex relationships to hegemonic power. Through this work, I seeks to denaturalize oppressive conditions and articulate experiences and knowledges silenced by officially sanctioned narratives. I am currently working in solidarity with Miya people in Northeast India to theorize “from below” and (co)create communities of resistance against coloniality and state violence.