Amrita Pande

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Amrita Pande is an Indian sociologist and feminist ethnographer based in South Africa, tenured as a professor at the University of Cape Town. [1] She was the first to publish a detailed ethnographical study on the surrogacy industry in India with her book Wombs in Labor (2014). [2] Pande has also been appointed as the lead for the National Research Foundation project into the surrogacy industry of South Africa. [3]

Biography

Pande was born in India to an academic family and graduated from the University of Delhi with a Bachelor of Arts in economics followed by a Master of Arts at the Delhi School of Economics. [4] [5] She states that the practice and curriculum at the premier but inflexible and apolitical institute killed her interest in the field and from which she sough refuge through the discipline of sociology. [4] Eventually, she earned a Master of Arts from the University of Massachusetts and completed her doctoral studies in transnational surrogacy, sustained by a fellowship from the public university. [4] [5]

She conducted her post doctoral research among African domestic workers in Tripoli, Lebanon and was eventually tenured as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town in 2010. [4] Between 2010 and 2014, she would occasionally visit India for her research into transnational commercial surrogacy and eventually published Wombs in Labor in 2014. [6] The work was published and described by the Columbia University Press as the first detailed ethnographical study into the transnational surrogacy industry in India. [2] Her work has also been cited in a Yale Law Journal paper on anti-discrimination and family law. [7]

Pande's works have been published in a number of international journals including Anthropologica , [8] Qualitative Sociology , [9] Current Sociology , [10] Critical Social Policy , [11] Feminist Studies [12] and International Migration Review. [13] The South African National Research Foundation has appointed her to lead a project into the surrogacy industry in the country. [3] One of her papers was quoted by the Centre for Social Research in its own study into the surrogacy industry in India. [14]

The Guardian notes that the media in India frames surrogacy either in terms of a great positive, as a boom of a life changing sum of money or as a great negative of poverty stricken women being forced into "renting wombs", a binary which according to Pande is detrimental to discourse and removes agency from the women involved. [6] She has occasionally appeared as a subject matter expert on op-eds in various national newspapers such as The Hindu and Mail & Guardian , and in various international news outlets such as on the BBC show conducted by Laurie Taylor, on Sarah Carey's show on Newstalk and on the Danish channel DR2 show called Deadline. [5] [15] [16] She also works as a performer-educator with a multimedia theatre production called Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm, which is based on her work on the surrogacy industry. [2] [17]

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References

  1. ↑ Monama, Tebogo (28 August 2020). "Young Afrikaans women travelling around the world to sell their eggs for up to R50k". Independent Online . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Pande, Amrita (2014). Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. Columbia University Press. ISBN   978-0-231-53818-3.
  3. 1 2 Nicolson, Ambre (18 November 2019). "Flows in the global fertility market". University of Cape Town . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Bernardo, Carla (17 August 2020). "Distinguished teacher Amrita Pande's classroom is her theatre". University of Cape Town . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  5. 1 2 3 "Amrita Pande". Department of Sociology. University of Cape Town . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  6. 1 2 Rabinowitz, Abby (28 April 2016). "The trouble with renting a womb | Abby Rabinowitz". The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  7. ↑ NeJamie, Douglas (June 2017). "The Nature of Parenthood". Yale Law Journal . 126: 8.
  8. ↑ Pande, Amrita (9 May 2015). "Blood, Sweat and Dummy Tummies: Kin Labour and Transnational Surrogacy in India". Anthropologica . 57 (1): 53–62. ISSN   2292-3586 – via Project MUSE.
  9. ↑ Pande, Amrita (25 September 2009). ""It May Be Her Eggs But It's My Blood": Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India". Qualitative Sociology . Springer. 32 (4): 379–397. doi:10.1007/s11133-009-9138-0. ISSN   1573-7837. S2CID   143835339.
  10. ↑ Pande, Amrita (1 March 2016). "Global reproductive inequalities, neo-eugenics and commercial surrogacy in India". Current Sociology . SAGE Journals. 64 (2): 244–258. doi:10.1177/0011392115614786. ISSN   0011-3921. S2CID   147070477.
  11. ↑ Pande, Amrita (1 August 2014). "'I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot': Paternalistic migration policies and the 'global exile'" . Critical Social Policy . SAGE Journals. 34 (3): 374–393. doi:10.1177/0261018314526008. ISSN   0261-0183. S2CID   145308234.
  12. ↑ Pande, Amrita (2010). ""At Least I Am Not Sleeping with Anyone": Resisting the Stigma of Commercial Surrogacy in India". Feminist Studies . 36 (2): 292–312. ISSN   0046-3663. JSTOR   27919102 – via JSTOR.
  13. ↑ Pande, Amrita (1 September 2018). "Intimate Counter‐Spaces of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon1" . International Migration Review . SAGE Journals. 52 (3): 780–808. doi:10.1111/imre.12325. ISSN   0197-9183. S2CID   148752427.
  14. ↑ Doval, Nikita; Apoorva, Vidya K. (30 October 2014). "Surrogacy industry thrives in India amid regulatory gaps". Livemint . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  15. ↑ Pande, Amrita (29 August 2016). "Surrogates are workers, not wombs". The Hindu . ISSN   0971-751X . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  16. ↑ Pande, Amrita (29 November 2018). "Labour law redefines parenthood". The Mail & Guardian . Retrieved 23 November 2020.
  17. ↑ "Surrogacy Bill's missteps". Himal Southasian . 12 October 2016.
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