M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. (Delhi)
Phone no: 022-25525329
Email: rhebbar@tiss.edu
Ritambhara Hebbar is a Professor in the School of Development Studies, Mumbai. She has over twenty years of experience in teaching and has taught both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Delhi university, SNDT Women's University, and TISS, Mumbai. She has specialised and written regularly on tribes in India, specifically on culture, the movement for self-rule, women and land rights, and tribal governance. Her book Ecology, Equality and Freedom: Engagement with Self-Rule in Jharkhand, Earthworm Books (2011) is an ethnographic study of the self-rule movement and a village in Jharkhand. She has also coauthored and coedited a book titled Towards a New Sociology in India, Orient Blackswan (2016).
She is the director and scenarist of a documentary film 'Gudna' (Tattoo; Engraving) on Adivasi artists who were a part of the annual festival 'Lokrang' organised by the Madhya Pradesh government in Bhopal, 2020. The film is an interaction with these artists where they reflect on how their changing socio-economic conditions are challenging and influencing their creative sensibility and expression. The film is part of the ongoing collaboration with ENAP Institute, Quebec and in partnership with the Quebec Office, Mumbai. She also curated 12 lectures on Indigenous peoples of Quebec (October-November 2020) and Tribal and Adivasi peoples in India (February- March 2021) along with ENAP Institute, Quebec and the Quebec Office in Mumbai. She is an Adjunct Researcher in the Observatoire des administrations publiques autochtones (Observatory of Indigenous Public Administrations), ENAP, Quebec. https://obsapa.org/equipe-de-recherche-5/
She has been researching and writing on tribes of South India for the past few years to comprehend the nature of anthropological and sociological research on them and the contemporary situation of tribes in the region. As part of her larger research interest in the sociology of mobility, social institutions and change in India, she has also been researching and writing about the security guards and other migrants in Mumbai. In 2019, she researched women domestic workers in Mumbai, which also involved holding capacity-building and advocacy workshops for the research participants to interact with the community service providers.
She is a part of various academic committees and bodies, including the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Sociological Bulletin, the official journal of the Indian Sociological Society, India and the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (online), Chaibasa, Jharkhand. She is also an executive committee member of the international journal, Asian Ethnicity, listed in Routledge Anthropological journals.
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Her broad areas of research and writing are Social Institutions and Development Experiences; Rurality, Rural Society and Social Change; Tribal Studies; and Sociology and Social Anthropology in India. She teaches on related themes such as Understanding Indian society, tribes in the contemporary world (focusing on tribal anthropology and cross-cultural perspective on tribes); tribes in India, introduction to qualitative research and advanced qualitative research methods, methodological issues in development research, social exclusion in India, environment and society, anthropology and development.