Ruchira Sen has defended her PhD dissertation on March 23, 2018. Her dissertation presents a non-capitalocentric framework to the neoliberal Empire of Capital, studying the historical development of empire from the viewpoint of households and States. Her focus is the commodification of the bodies and labor of women. Sen substantiates the claim that households and State systems are not only sites of the Triple Movement between the incursions of capitalist processes and the resistance of non-capitalist processes, but they are also sites of identity politics and conflict. As evident, Sen is heavily influenced by (though she is occasionally critical of) Rosa Luxemburg, Gibson-Graham, Hardt and Negri, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, David Harvey and Nancy Fraser.
Sen thoroughly enjoys teaching. She has taught three sections of Introductory Macroeconomics and one section of Intermediate Microeconomics. Her teaching evaluations have won her the Graduate Teaching Assistant Superior Teaching Award in 2016. Sen has also served as Teaching Assistant for two sections of Introductory Microeconomics and for two graduate classes -History of Economic Thought and Political Economy of Race, Class and Gender- where she led vibrant discussion sessions on Smith, Ricardo, Sraffa and Marx, Feminist Postcolonial Political Economy and Theories of Racial Discrimination. Sen uses creative teaching methods such as classroom games for Intermediate Microeconomics, reference to context analysis for Introductory Macroeconomics and comparative theoretical analysis for History of Thought and Political Economy.
Currently, Sen is working on a book section with Viviana Grieco, Associate Professor of History at UMKC, on “Global Networks of Care -Women’s Work and Immigrant Families in the Midwest” where they contrast time sent in housework and care by Latinos and Latinas (from the American Time Use Survey) and investigate the support Latinx families in the midwestern United States give to and receive from their countries of origin, in terms of care work. Clara Irazabel-Zurita, Director of the Latinx Studies Program at UMKC, has invited Grieco and Sen to contribute their work to her forthcoming collection of essays.
Sen is also working on a paper with Mathew Forstater, examining the genealogy of the notion of the socio-material provisioning process as the subject of inquiry in Political Economy. Forstater and Sen believe that distinguishing material provisioning from its social aspect leads to theoretical inaccuracies and thereby, attempt to reconcile socio-materiality with the concept of materialism in Classical Political Economy.
In addition to her PhD, Sen also has a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Her MPhil dissertation examines the vertical disintegration of the textiles, garments and leather industry in India into smaller, informal units. On the basis of National Sample Survey Organization data, she suggests that these industries are making inroads into household production, where homes are becoming sites of production for global markets. While in JNU, Sen was inspired by student and women’s movements of which she was an active part. Currently, Sen is a Research Fellow for the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. She also volunteers for Kansas City’s Global and Multicultural Education and follows URPE, ICAPE and IAFFE.
