Nandita Dutta
Postdoctoral Researcher
Member of the Working Group on Social Geography with a Focus on Population and Migration Research
Member of the Research Group Society – Space – Migration
Researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre ›Production of Migration‹ ( SFB 1604)
Research interests: Migration and mobilities, Climate mobilities, Politics of knowledge production, Urban spaces, Futures, Gender and South Asia.
Nandita Dutta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre Production of Migration ( SFB 1604) at Osnabrück University. Her research lies at the intersections of migration and mobilities, gender, urban studies, and decolonial epistemologies. As part of the SFB, she investigates the politics of knowledge production surrounding the climate change–migration nexus through ethnographic fieldwork at academic conferences and in coastal villages in India ( Project C5). Her work examines how social, scientific, and spatial imaginaries of the climate crisis and migration produce the epistemic object of climate migration. She is also co-editor of the volume “Epistemic Trust and Migration Studies”, forthcoming in 2027.
She holds a PhD from University College London (UCL) wherein she conducted an ethnography of beauty salons run by first-generation migrant women from South Asia in London. In her doctoral thesis, she unpacked how beauty salons act as sites of diasporic intimacy by investigating dynamics of gender, race, religion and caste in these spaces. She has also researched migrant South Asian garment workers and Information Technology workers in the UK, and beauty workers in France. She holds an MA in Gender Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London where she was a Chevening scholar and a BA in Journalism from University of Mumbai.
Journal Articles
Dutta, N., 2025. Spatio-scientific imaginaries. Climate and Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2025.2590714
Dutta, N. and Stierl, M. 2025. Modern Slavery and Migration: A Conversation on the Production of Invasive Figures and Racist Imaginaries. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385251393126
Dutta, N., 2025. Mapping the beauty salon as a diasporic space. Gender, Place & Culture. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2477573
Dutta, N., 2023. All in a day’s work: affective labor, disaffection and migrant leisure in a South Asian beauty salon. Journal of Leisure Studies. http://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2023.2195200
Dutta, N., 2022. Drag Queen in the Beauty Salon: What Theorizing Strange Bedfellows Together can tell us about Aunty Work. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. http://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2135272
Dutta, N., 2021. “I Like it Clean”: Brazilian Waxing and Postfeminist Subjectivity Among South Asian Beauticians in London. Frontiers in Sociology, 6.
Other Publications
Dutta, N., and Pott, A. (forthcoming). Lost places and the techniques of producing climate migration. In H. Schwenken, I. Löhr, & M. Stierl (Eds.), Production of Migration: Empirical Analyses. Springer Nature. (Accepted for publication).
Dutta, N. (forthcoming). Unpacking the ‘nexus’ of climate change, migration and modern slavery in knowledge production. In A. Achi, A. Balch, G. Craig, M. Esslemont, H. Lewis, & L. Waite (Eds.), Disrupting Modern Slavery Knowledge Production. Polity Press. (Accepted for publication).
Dutta, N., 2024. How Caste Smells: Notes From A South Asian Beauty Salon In London. Behanbox. Link
Agarwal, P., Dutta, N. and Soundararajan, V., 2024. Did crying modern slavery in Leicester benefit the workers? Open Democracy. Link
Dutta, N., 2019. F-Rated: Being a Woman Filmmaker in India. New Delhi: HarperCollins India.