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About Lakshita Malik

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

NBN Episodes hosted by Lakshita:

Mobilities and Methods August 26, 2022

Cultural Labour

Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India

Brahma Prakash

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves …
Mobilities and Methods August 10, 2022

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property

Minh-Ha T. Pham

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the …
Mobilities and Methods July 6, 2022

The Opportunity Trap

High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program

Pallavi Banerjee

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (NYU Press, 2022) is the first book to look at the impact of the H- …
Mobilities and Methods May 24, 2021

Nobody's People

Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves

Anastasia Piliavsky

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Anastasia Piliavsky's book Nobody's …
Anthropology January 26, 2021

The Cow in the Elevator

An Anthropology of Wonder

Tulasi Srinivas

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
In The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke UP, 2018), Tulasi Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present …
South Asian Studies December 30, 2020

Muscular India

Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class

Michiel Baas

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
The gyms of urban ‘new India’ are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions are also vehicles of upward mobility for the trainers and …
African Studies December 4, 2020

Beauty Diplomacy

Embodying an Emerging Nation

Oluwakemi M. Balogun

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the …
Mobilities and Methods September 21, 2020

Indian Sex Life

Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

Durba Mitra

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In …
Mobilities and Methods September 3, 2020

Insurgent Aesthetics

Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War

Ronak K. Kapadia

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press), Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in …
Gender Studies August 20, 2020

Work! A Queer History of Modeling

A Queer History of Modeling

Elspeth H. Brown

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and …
Mobilities and Methods August 3, 2020

The Globally Familiar

Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi

Gabriel Dattatreyan

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
In his book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), Gabriel Dattatreyan departs from the existing literature on masculinity in India, which …
Mobilities and Methods July 30, 2020

Fashioning Diaspora

Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture

Vanita Reddy

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture (Temple University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies through the analytic of beauty. Through …
Mobilities and Methods July 17, 2020

Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt

Navigating the Margins of Respectability

L .L. Wynn

Hosted by Lakshita Malik
L.L. Wynn’s book Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability (University of Texas Press) is an interrogation of urban life and gendered mobilities in Cairo …