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Book launch: Traders and Tinkers

02 November 2023, 4:30 pm–6:30 pm

Traders and Tinkers book cover

The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies is pleased to welcome Maitrayee Deka to launch her new book 'Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy (Stanford UP)

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower Street, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Maitrayee Deka’s 'Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy' (Stanford UP, 2023) 

This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.

Please register to attend at https://ccs-traders.eventbrite.co.uk


The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies is a world-leading centre for critical interdisciplinary research into the past, present, and future of capitalism. It brings together UCL faculty and students studying how markets, finance and economic institutions shape our everyday life, structure societies’ capacity to change, and are contested and remade across time and space.​​​​​​​

About the Speaker

Dr Maitrayee Deka

Senior Lecturer at Department of Sociology, University of Essex

My research is in the area of Economic Sociology, STS, Consumer Cultures and Social Theory. I am interested in looking at alternative systems to global capitalism to frame them as a distinct analytical and political category. Part of this interest emerges from examining global bazaar economies as a popular economic system based on my ethnography in Delhi's Electronic Bazaars and developed as a monograph, Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy, published with Stanford University Press. I am currently researching the Whitechapel market in East London to investigate bazaars as intellectual places drawing from the literature on public space, and Autonomist Marxism. The other strand of my research focuses on marginal cultural spaces, particularly young adults' social media use in the Global South, to see how they engage with global platforms in unique ways. Overall, I am interested in building a more embedded social theory through observations and practices often ignored in the dominant academic framework.

More about Dr Maitrayee Deka