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Academic Experts
Academic Experts
Dr. Namreeta Kumari
Assistant Professor
namreeta.kumari@mail.jiit.ac.in
Biography

Dr. Namreeta Kumari political scientist whose academic training and teaching are situated at the

intersection of gender, state, and institutional practices. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science

from the University of Delhi, with her doctoral research focusing on Surrogate Motherhood: A

Comparative Study of Gujarat and Delhi, which interrogated the structural embedding of

reproductive labor within market and policy discourses. Her academic journey includes an

M.Phil. in Political Science from the University of Delhi and an M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru

University. With over four years of teaching experience, she has previously held academic

positions at Sharda University and Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi. Since 2022, she

has been associated with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jaypee Institute of

Information Technology, Noida, where she teaches political philosophy, Human Rights & Social

Justice, Introduction to Political Science, and Indian Constitution & Traditional Knowledge.

Her pedagogical approach draws from critical, feminist, and postcolonial frameworks, with a

strong emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. She remains engaged in academic mentorship and

institutional academic development. Dr. Kumari’s commitment to teaching and scholarship

reflects a sustained engagement with questions of justice, dignity, and marginality within

contemporary Indian society.

Research Highlights

Dr. Namreeta Kumari’s research explores the deeply entangled relations between reproductive labor, institutional regulation, and gendered precarity within contemporary India. Her work

critiques dominant discourses on empowerment by foregrounding how commercial surrogacy

markets produce and manage reproductive capacities through moral, legal, and economic

narratives. Moving beyond formalist readings, her scholarship adopts ethnographic and feminist

methodological orientations to understand lived experience within stratified structures of power.

Her published work includes peer-reviewed articles in Social Change and Social Action, as well

as a chapter in Palgrave’s volume on Gender Identity and Migration in India, where she

examines the brokerage of reproductive labor through both state and informal actors. Her

writings engage with critical debates on the commodification of care, body politics, and the role

of law in constructing social hierarchies.

Dr. Kumari has presented her research at significant national and international forums, including

the Law and Society Association (LSA) Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. She has been a

recipient of the ICSSR travel grant and contributed to projects supported by the NCW and

ICSSR. Her ongoing research agenda extends to feminist knowledge production, intersectional

methodologies, and the politics of regulation in informal and reproductive economies.

Publications
  • N. Kumari, “Facilitators and Reproductive Laborers in Indian Surrogacy Market,” in Gender Identity & Migration in India, N. Chowdhory and P. Banerjee, Eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
  • N. Chowdhory, M. S. Ali, R. Kaur, M. Kajla, N. Kumari, B. Tiwari, and S. Isha, “Gendering Migration: Evaluating Empowerment of Single Migrant Women,” Social Change, vol. 52, no. 1, 2022.
  • N. Kumari, “A Gaze Devoid of Dignity,” Social Action, vol. 66, no. 1, 2016.N. Kumari, “Hindu Women in India: An Autobiographical Study of Haimabati Sen ‘because I am a Woman’,” Social Sciences International Research Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016.
  • N. Kumari, “Commercial Surrogacy in India: Is Prohibition an Answer to the ‘Markets of Life’ in India,” Remarking Analisation, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019.