Dr Laura Bear

Laura Bear has a PhD in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan. She is a specialist on India and ethnographies of the state, labour, and memory. She has conducted fieldwork in a railway company town, Kharagpur, in India particularly among Anglo-Indian workers and their families. This research combined with further ethnographic and archival work in Calcutta and New Delhi reread archives from the perspective of railway workers' accounts of and dispositions towards the past. Their family histories revealed the complex interweaving of capitalism, community, and nation bequeathed from the colonial past that still haunts the practices and spaces of the contemporary railway. They were also commentaries on the difficulties of composing genealogical histories that are apart from nationalist histories. Reflecting further theoretical interests in globalisation and technology, her current research is on international call centre workers in Calcutta. This project explores how workers reshape their identities as citizens, Bengalis, family members, participants in urban and religious communities and as consumers in relation to this new kind of labour. It focuses equally on the emerging technological selves in the workplace and on the changes in family relationships.

Selected publications:

Forthcoming. The homecoming of globalisation: Politics and consumption among international call centre workers in Kolkata. In Making a living: Livelihoods, imagination and globalisation in India, A. Gupta and K. Kapila (eds). Delhi: Oxford University Press / Durham: Duke University Press. 

2007. Lines of the Nation: Indian railway workers, bureaucracy, and the intimate historical self. New York: Columbia University Press.

2007. Ruins and ghosts: the domestic uncanny and the materialisation of Anglo-Indian genealogies. In Ghosts of memory: Essays on remembrance and relatedness, J. Carsten (ed). Oxford: Blackwell. 

2007. (with G. Pollock & M. Burki) The politics of display: Warte Mal! and social documentary. In Exhibition Experiments, P. Basu (ed). Oxford: Blackwell. 

2006. An economy of suffering: Addressing the violence of discipline in railway workers' petitions to the agent of the East Indian Railway, 1930-47. In Discipline and the Other Body, A. Rao and S. Peirce (eds). Durham: Duke University Press. 

2005. School stories and the interior frontiers of citizenship: Tracing the domestic life of Anglo-Indian education. In Education and nationalism in Europe, South Asia, China: Manufacturing citizenship, V. Bénéï (ed). London: Routledge. 

2001. Public genealogies: Documents, bodies and nations in Anglo-Indian Railway family histories. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 35(3): 356-88.

2000. The Jadu House: intimate histories of Anglo-India. London: Doubleday

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