海角社区

My scholarship and teaching illuminate how local and global dynamics of culture and the economy reflect and challenge one another. In the two major research projects that have defined my scholarship so far, I have examined the institutional contexts of work, finance, and international development in the geographical contexts of urban India, the U.S., and South Africa. In my classroom and in my writing, am particularly attentive to how contemporary forms of racial, caste, class, and gender inequality are products of the interconnected legacies of colonialism and slavery. My methodological preference for fine-grained ethnography and interviews, and my theoretical bent towards the world-systemic dynamics of economy and culture link, at every turn, the individual/personal with the public, the social, and the political.

 

My new book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, examines the taken-for-granted practices and institutional arrangements of commercial microfinance institutions in urban India, a sector that reaches over 40 million poor and working class women through small, high-interest loans. Through interviews and ethnographic work in India and the United States, this project investigates how exploitative financial practices expand to vulnerable populations while ensuring profit for lending institutions. I pay close attention to the relationships between loan officers and working women clients. Developing the notion of a gendered microfinance chain, I show how commercial microfinance institutions, with the support of the state, extract financial and reputational value from working class women to more powerful groups in the industry, especially privileged men.

 

I have just completed an edited volume with Dr. Gowri Vijayakumar, Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan). This volume envisions how the discipline of sociology may be transformed when we place the region of South Asia at the center of our empirical analyses. In addition, I am currently working on a new book with Dr. Cinzia Solari that examines the gender order of neoliberalism, with comparative examinations of South and Southeast Asia, the U.S., and the former Soviet Union.
 

My first book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a Transnational Class was a multi-sited ethnographic examination of transnational Indian information technology (IT) workers. Prior to this book, I studied the cultural politics of post-apartheid South Africa, based on extensive research with South African Indian communities in Durban and its surrounding townships.

 

At Wellesley, I teach courses that examine globalization, race, gender, and diaspora studies, among other topics. My courses offer students an opportunity to think deeply about social difference in the context of an interconnected, albeit fragmented world. I have produced the following massively open online courses on the edX platform: Global Sociology, Global Inequality, and Global Social Change. The educational materials I developed for these courses, including onsite lectures and interviews with prominent scholars, have reached thousands of learners around the world, and I continue to integrate them into my on-campus teaching at Wellesley. 

 

I am a strong advocate for anti-racist transformation in our education system. At Wellesley, I have served on numerous committees to advance the goals of inclusive excellence on our campus. As a Natick parent, I promote diverse books in public schools through education and advocacy.

 

Alongside my academic life, I perform and promote classical and contemporary Indian dance forms, especially Bharatanatyam. In 2015, I established NATyA Dance in Natick, which includes a performance collective as well as classes for children and adults. 

Janell Hobson is Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany. She is also Director of both Undergraduate Studies and the Honors Program. She joined the core faculty shortly after receiving her PhD in Women's Studies at Emory University. Hobson has since devoted her research, teaching, and service to multiracial and transnational feminist issues in the discipline with a focus on representations and histories of women in the African Diaspora.

Hobson is the author of When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination (Routleldge, 2021), Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005, second edition, 2018), and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012). She has also edited the volumes Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms (SUNY Press, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Black Women鈥檚 Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2021). She is a contributing writer to Ms. Magazine, as well as various online platforms. She also guest edited special volumes on Harriet Tubman and slavery in popular culture. She was selected as a Community Fellow for 2021-2022 at the University at Albany鈥檚 Institute for History and Public Engagement, which supports her guest editing of the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project with Ms. Magazine for the Spring 2022 semester.

Hobson teaches diverse courses on intersections of race, class, gender, media, popular culture, and feminist theory.

Bio
 Ghassan Moussawi is an associate professor of gender and women's studies and sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the intersections of transnational gender and sexuality studies, inequalities, race and ethnicity, postcolonial feminisms, affect and emotion studies, violence and war, and queer of color critique, with keen attention to nation and empire.
Research interests
 Transnational gender and sexualities
 Race and ethnicity
 Queer theory
 Queer of color critique
 Urban studies
 Feminist theory and methods
 Transnational mobility
 Affect and emotions
Violence and War
 Empire
LGBT refugees and immigrants
Education
PhD, Rutgers University

, an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is an expert on feminism, social movements and emotion in politics. She is the author of “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution” and “Political Disappointment.”