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Mangala Subramaniam

Photo of Mangala Subramaniam

Promoted to Professor
Department of Sociology

mangala@purdue.edu

Mangala Subramaniam received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and her master’s from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is in the broad areas of social movements and social inequality. Topics include: state, state power, development and globalization, social movements (including transnational movements), with gender and its intersections with race, caste and class. She has a special interest in India/South Asia. Much of her work adopts a global focus and draws attention to the ways in which disadvantaged groups, particularly in the non-western world, engage in daily resistances and collective protests to demand rights. 

Subramaniam has authored and co-authored articles in journals such as: International Sociology, Feminist Criminology, Critical Sociology, Mobilization, and Gender & Society.  Her monograph, The Power of Women's Organizing: Gender, Caste, and Class in India (2006) focuses on the women’s movement in India with specific attention to dalit women’s organizing.  Her co-edited volumes include: Dowry: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice, 2009 (with Tamsin Bradley and Emma Tomlin) and The Power of Women’s Informal Networks: Lessons in Social Change from South Asia and West Africa, 2004 (with Bandana Purkayastha).

Her ongoing research projects focus on organizational dynamics (including state agencies) in the dissemination of information about HIV/AIDS in India and career trajectories in the veterinary medicine profession in the US (examining the feminization and the lack of racial/ethnic diversity) with an interdisciplinary group of scholars. 

Subramaniam is a College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Fellow.