Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Sociocultural Anthropology
- South and Southeast Asia
Areas of Interest
Areas of Interest/Research keywords: Animal studies, extraordinary ethics, affect & the senses, queer & feminist theory, imagination & expression, death & violence, anthropology & philosophy, friendship & intimacies.
Research Region: India
Biography
My research concerns emergent forms of politics and relationality in contemporary urban India. My first book, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke 2012) examines the relationship between queer desires and queer political formations. I argue, in short, that activism is an ethical practice comprised of critique, invention, and creative relational practice. Queer Activism was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology. My second book project, tentatively titled Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being is a study of human-animal relationality in Indian cities including Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. The book is comprised of ten short chapters, each set within a unique sensorium and addressing a specific ethical question regarding how human and non-human animals live and die in a shared world. These questions are addressed ethnographically, through an attention to the everyday life of animals, activists, farmers, transporters, and of cities themselves. Among the questions the book attempts to answer are: How is activism exhausted? How do we become other? Can indifference be the basis for an ethical engagement with the world? Does that which is inevitable cease to matter? Across my projects, I have an interest in practices of ethnographic expression, and in the work of narrative. I teach courses on animality, the otherwise, literary anthropology, sports, nature, friendship, queer anthropology, affect, & anthropological theory. On campus, I am affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies and serve on the steering committee of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
“Dave” is pronounced Davé.
Prior Education:
PhD, University of Michigan
Publications:
In progress. "The Permissible & the Perverse: Indian Geographies of Interspecies Sex." With Alok Gupta. Environment & Planning E.
2021. For a Synaesthetics of Seeing. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 39(1): 143-149.
2019. Narcissus. In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, Anand Pandian and Cymene Howe, eds. Punctum Books.
2017. Something, Everything, Nothing; or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots. Social Text 35 (1): 35-57.
2014. Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming. Cultural Anthropology 29(3): 433-456. Reprinted, with minor edits, in Unfinished (2017).
2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham: Duke University Press. (South Asia edition published in 2016, New Delhi: Zubaan)
2011. “Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia.” Feminist Studies 37(1): 1-15.
2011. “Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India.” Cultural Dynamics. 23(1): 3-20.
Book Reviews & Other Essays
2018. What it Feels Like to Be Free: The Tense of Justice. Forum on “Justice,” Cultural Anthropology.
2015. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. By Brian Massumi. Somatosphere.
2015. Queer Respites. Forum on “Queer Futures,” Cultural Anthropology.
2014. Deviations. By Gayle Rubin. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(1):176-177.
2008. “Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. By Gayatri Gopinath.” American Ethnologist 35(4): 4090-4094.
Interviews
The Ethnography of Activism: A Conversation with Naisargi Dave.
The Ethnography of Activism: The Satya Interview with Naisargi Dave.
Witness, with Hemanjini Gupta for Cultural Anthropology.
Graduate Students
- Wesley Brunson
- Maya El Helou
- Noha Fikry
- Mathew Gagne
- Shirin Gerami
- George Mantzios
- Kevin Nixon
- Celeste Pang
- Ridhima Sharma
- Elliott Tilleczek