Staff Profiles

I have a first-class honours degree in International Development from the University of Liverpool, a MSc in Cross-Cultural Research Methods and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex. My doctoral and ongoing research is focused on labour, migration, craftwork, and Islam in India and the Gulf. I also have publications in progress examining urban space, marginalisation and the socio-economic position of Indian Muslims. Additionally, I have emerging research interests focusing on the role of paperwork and other documents in constructing citizenship and forms of marginalisation in India. I have substantial teaching experience across a range of formats including seminars, lectures and dissertation supervision at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. My research interests are broad ranging but primarily focus on provisional urban spaces in North India and the patterns of migration, sociality, and economy that emerge in these contexts.

 

Books

• Chambers T, Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans, UCL Press (2020)
  ISBN: 9781787354555 eISBN: 9781787354531
  Abstract

  Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness.

  By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.    

Journal articles

• Ansari A, Chambers T, 'Gendering the Everyday State: Muslim Women, Claim-Making & Brokerage in India'
  Contemporary South Asia x (2021)
  ISSN: 0958-4935 eISSN: 1469-364X
  Abstract

  Using ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries and brokers, and the Indian state. The article illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. This is further mediated by bureaucratic structures, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and gender ideologies. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women’s engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make
  claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated and intersected by socioeconomic and other factors but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foreground male brokers operating through male-dominated networks. These empirical details are situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between imaginaries of ‘nation’ and lived experiences of the ‘everyday state’. While nation is evoked and articulated as a feminine form through evocations of mata (mother) – and supposed characteristics of care, nurture, chastity etc. – the everyday state is experienced as a masculinised formation which acts to entrench degrees of graduated citizenship by amplifying this along gender lines. 

• Chambers T, 'From Fieldsite to ‘Fieldsite’: Ethnographic Methods in the Time of COVID'
  Studies in Indian Politics 8 (2) (2020) pp.290-293
  ISSN: 2321-0230 eISSN: 2321-7472
  Website 
• Chambers T, '"Lean on Me": Sifarish, Mediation & the Digitisation of State Bureaucracies in India'
  Ethnography x (2020)
  ISSN: 1466-1381 eISSN: 1741-2714
  Abstract

  Through an ethnographic focus on Muslim neighbourhoods in a North Indian city, this article traces the effects of increasing digitisation of Public Distribution Systems (PDS) and ID provision in India by examining the implications for relations between the state, low-level political actors and local populaces. The article explores the practice of sifarish (leaning on someone to get something done) which, it is argued, cannot be seen within simplistic rubrics of ‘corruption’ but instead comprises a socially embedded ethical continuum. With one of the stated aims of digitisation being the displacing of informal mediation, the ethnographic material illuminates the efforts of low-level political actors to navigate emerging digital infrastructures. Digitisation, however, does not end mediation and carries with it ideological, political and economic interests. This, the article argues,
  enables state/people spaces of mediation to be commodified and marketized and further cements processes of marginalisation experienced by India’s Muslim minority. 
  

  Website 
• Chambers T, '"Comfort" & "Discomfort": A Brechtian Intervention in Teaching Space & Practice'
  Teaching Anthropology 9 (1) (2020) pp.25-34
  ISSN: 2053-9843
  Abstract

  This paper disrupts notions of ‘comfort’ as always being a desirable product when attending to spatial contexts and teaching practice. The paper draws on a long theatrical tradition stemming from the work of Bertolt Brecht which, among other things, seeks to stimulate critical thought not by making the audience comfortable but by creating a sense of ‘discomfort’ through alienation and other techniques. I bring this together with work on ‘critical pedagogy’, which attends to occasions when ‘discomfort’ provides a powerful teaching tool and with anthropological ideas that seek to draw more embodied engagements with ethnography into classroom and lecture contexts. The paper takes a reflexive approach to these interventions, evaluating not only the successes but also problems and challenges that the use of ‘discomfort’ raises.  The article engages with material on critical pedagogy and teaching practice.
  

  Website 
• Chambers T, '"Performed Conviviality": Space, Bordering & Silence in the City'
  Modern Asian Studies 53 (3) (2019) pp.776-799
  ISSN: 0026-749X eISSN: 1469-8099
  Abstract Through ethnographic material gathered in Muslim woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of a North Indian city, this article attends to ‘performed’ elements of everyday convivial interactions. It builds on work situating conviviality as a normative project aimed at understanding and fostering interaction within urban space that bridges forms of difference. Through descriptive accounts the article illustrates how convivial exchanges can embody degrees of instrumentality and conceal relations of power and marginalisation that act to silence outrage or contestation. This ‘performed conviviality’ is dealt with in a broader context of ‘scale’ that considers how marginalisation and connectedness (the marginal hub) intersect in even the most mundane moments of convivial
  exchange. By tracing processes of marginalisation, boundary making and bordering within the local, citywide, state and international context, the article follows the production of a marginalised or ‘border’ subjectivity through to the individual level. The subjectivities produced in this context act to enforce degrees of self-imposed silence amongst those subjected to processes of marginalisation. In addition, again attending to scale through an acknowledgement of the connected nature of the mohallas, the article also considers the role of conviviality in
  global chains of supply through the creation and maintenance of bonds and obligations that facilitate production in the city’s wood industry.
  Website 
• Carswell G, Chambers T, De Neve G, 'Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India'
  Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37 (4) (2018) pp.597-616
  ISSN: 2399-6544 eISSN: 2399-6552
  Abstract

  This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An analysis of various forms of waiting – ‘on the day’, ‘to and fro’, and ‘chronic’ waiting – reveals how temporal processes operate as mechanisms of power and control through which state actors and other mediators produce differentiated forms of citizenship and citizens. Temporal processes and their material outcomes, we argue, are shaped by class, caste and religion, while also drawing on – and reproducing – gendered identities and inequalities. However, rather than being ‘passive’ patients of the state, we show how ordinary people draw on money, patronage networks and various performative acts in an attempt to secure their rights as citizens of India.
  

  Website 
• Chambers T, Ansari A, '"Ghar Mein Kām Hai" (There is work in the house): When female factory workers become "coopted domestic labour"'
  Journal of South Asian Development 13 (2) (2018) pp.141-163
  ISSN: 0973-1741 eISSN: 0973-1733
  Abstract This article examines the utilization of female Muslim factory workers, in a north Indian woodworking industry, as domestic labour in the homes of their employers. The ethnography illustrates the importance of considering hidden forms of domestic-sector employment where workers are coopted into domestic tasks. The illumination of ‘coopted domestic labour’ has implications for understanding the breadth and scope of the sector and contributes to debates around its regulation, definition, growth, and feminization. Female Muslim factory workers did not see ‘coopted domestic labour’ as a livelihood ‘choice’ but as a stark form of exploitation enabled through employers’ tactics, such as the use of advance payments, and through structural continuity across domestic and industrial contexts which situated women at the bottom of the labour hierarchy. It also involved complex negotiations around reputation, character and practices of purdah (veiling) which, whilst already an issue for those working in factories, became intensified when entering the homes of others. The contribution of this paper is to place these processes of cooption into a specifically gendered context and to bring discussions of the role of advance payments into debates on paid domestic labour and Muslim women’s labour force participation. Website 
• Chambers T, 'Continuity in Mind: Imagination and Migration in India and the Gulf'
  Modern Asian Studies 52 (4) (2018) pp.1420-1456
  ISSN: 0026-749X eISSN: 1469-8099
  Abstract In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations and hopes of labour migrants the article argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding, not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the article explores the ways in which
  migration, its effects and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination, a process which is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the article gives attention to continuity at the material, personal and more emotive level. This runs counter to many accounts which situate migration as rupturing or change driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways providing comfort and familiarity but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad. Website 
• Grover S, Chambers T, Jeffery P, 'Portraits of Women’s Paid Domestic-Care Labour: Ethnographic Studies from Globalizing India'
  Journal of South Asian Development 13 (2) (2018) pp.123-140
  ISSN: 0973-1741 eISSN: 0973-1733
  Abstract Our introduction to this Special Issue draws out themes from all four articles which focus on India’s domestic-care economy: women’s paid domestic labour, care work and surrogacy. Through fine-grained ethnographic detail, all the articles nuance questions around agency and resistance, and actively challenge the ‘passive victim’ stereotype that continues to be the primary imaginary in many representations of domestic-care workers. We describe how the articles detail the intimacy, emotional labour and complex spatial dynamics inherent within a sector that often involves working in the homes of others, caring for children, and complex relationships with employers. Additionally, we show how care workers encounter quotidian forms of bodily control, distancing, segregation, authority, stigma, coercion, punitive sanctions and stark exploitation embedded in the intersections of class, caste, gender and ethnicity. To provide a wider framing for the articles, we utilize this introduction to situate them within broader historical and geographical contexts. Thus, we consider how Global Care Chains (GCCs), labour markets, migration, and colonial/postcolonial considerations interplay in shaping the everyday lives of domestic care workers in contemporary globalizing India.Website 

Book chapters

• Chambers T, 'Globalities & temporalities of artisanship: Lessons from an Indian wood art industry' in Anna Morcom and Neelam Raina (ed.), Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia: Craftspeople and Performers, Routledge (2019)
  

Reviews

• Thomas Chambers, review of Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer (Eds). 2012. Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, in Journal of South Asian Development 9 (1) (2014) pp.94-ISSN: 0973-1741 eISSN: 0973-1733
  Website 

Other publications

• Thomas Chambers, 'ALL HAIL THE ENTREPRENEUR!'
  

  Blog Piece that critically analyses the neoliberal construction of the 'entrepreneur' 

  (2016) Website