Research interests
- state, development, democracy, digital politics, South Asian politics
Current projects
Statemaking and Counterinsurgency: This research challenges work which treats counterinsurgency merely as a top-down policy agenda and ignores the everyday nuances of state-society relations in counterinsurgency contexts, and how state -citizen relations often lie betwixt and between acquiescence and resistance. Lipika's book manuscript, Making and Remaking the State, examines the relationship between counterinsurgency, statemaking, citizenship and development in modern India. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research on the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal, she explores how counterinsurgency recurs as a primary driver of colonial and postcolonial statemaking in regions associated today with the Maoist insurgency in India. With particular attention to the relationships between state actors and rural women that emerge in a counterinsurgency context, and how women navigate citizenship and development in rural India. This book draws on my doctoral research, and parts of it have been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
Digital Technology and Everyday Politics: Lipika's research in this area examines how digital technology is reshaping democratic politics and the politics of development. She is a co-investigator on a WhatsApp funded project with Philippa Williams (QMUL Geography) on ‘Social media and Everyday Life’ which examines the role of WhatsApp in shaping political life and subjectivities in India. They have now extended the project to examine situated experiences of (digital) privacy (not funded by WhatsApp). For further information, see the project website.
Lipika is beginning research on a new project on gender, digital technology and the state. In the backdrop of the Indian state mandating women development workers to use smartphones, she seeks to examine how women respond to the compulsory use of digital technology in their everyday work and life.
She is also leading a British Academy seed-funded project on comparing the use of digital technology during elections in South Asia and Latin America. Along with Ainhoa Montoya (School of Advanced Study, University of London, she is building a network of academics who work on this theme in both regions.
Women and Democracy: Over the past decade, women in India are voting in elections much more than before and political parties have started to take them seriously as a separate electorate. Within this context, Lipika has been conducting fieldwork since 2019 among women voters of different age, caste, class and generational backgrounds, to understand how they perceive the act of voting, and how they imagine themselves as democratic citizens in a society where gender inequalities continue to persist. While political scientists and election analysts have now started to write about woman voters in their analyses, there is still no qualitative study which reveals what women in India think about the act of voting, whether their gender influences their voting behaviour, whether women vote for who the male members of the family vote for or, and whether they have strong preferences in terms of parties and candidates.
The second strand of her work on women and democracy is on gender and the language of politics. She is part of the research team of an ERC-funded project ‘India’s Politics in its Vernaculars’, led by Anastasia Piliavsky (King’s College London). As part of this project, she studies women-aimed rhetoric in Indian politics. In particular, Lipika focuses on the idioms and language that political parties in north India use to address women voters in their campaigns and election manifestoes. And how women voters, in turn, adopt this political language, and also create their own.