Rasika Ajotikar

Does Identity Politics Unite or Divide us? Reflections on Social Justice and its Theorisations in Music Studies

Rasika Ajotikar is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London. Her project broadly looks at labour and hereditary musicianship in India as it relates to class, caste and gender. Dr Ajotikar is trained in ethnomusicology and her prior research was an ethnographic study of anti-caste and feminist movements in the western region of India. She was a postdoctoral fellow on a DFG (German Research Foundation) project on sound archives at the department of Musicology in Göttingen in collaboration with the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv between 2017 and 2020. She was a teaching fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Göttingen. As a music practitioner herself, Dr Ajotikar is also involved in creative collaborations with activists and musicians in India.