Avishek Ray

Holds BA (2007) and MA (2009) both in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Finished a PhD-level coursework (2009-10) from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS, http://www.cscsarchive.org), Bangalore, India while simultaneously working as a research associate in the Culture-Subjectivity-Psyche (CUSP) unit of the same institute. While in CUSP he studied the interface of hierarchical relations between the ‘western’ medicine and other indigenous modes of healing on the one hand and the doctor as the ‘service-provider’ and the patient as the ‘stakeholder’ on the other.

Currently working on archaeology of vagabondage: aiming to do a genealogy of  ‘vagabondage’ and design a theoretical framework to understand the politics of visual representations of the vagabond; looking into when, how and why vagabondage crystallized as a separate form of travel-genre distinguished from the more indigenously known forms (say, the pilgrimage in the West) and politically account for the ‘dividing practice’ that renders one as ‘traveler’ and the other ‘vagabond’; one an ‘explorer’ and the other ‘wanderer’ and so on.

Interests: traveling, cinema, photography.