Dr. Sneha Gole completed her B A in Political Science from Fergusson College, Pune, Maharashtra, and has a masters’ degree in S ocial W ork from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. She subsequently completed her doctoral work in 2018 in the discipline of Women’s Studies from the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, examining the women’s movement in the post 1990 period, mapping new spaces, strategies and issues of the movement. Her research areas are social movements, with a particular focus on women’s movements, gender and development, and gender and culture. She teaches papers on feminisms, feminist research methodology, and gender and popular culture, among others. Her other areas of engagement and research have been gender and higher education, the social history and cultural politics of K athak and the issue of declining child sex ratios. She was awarded the Awaben Wadia Archival Fellow ship by RCWS, SNDT University to work on an archive of life narratives of young feminists, 2017-18.
The present context is one of renewed backlash against feminism, both in India and the US and the increasing erosion of hard-won rights for ‘women’. Dr. Gole’s research funded by the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow ship titled ‘Understanding feminist subjectivities in the times of intersectionality: Linking Narratives, Memory and Politics’ is an attempt to understand the predicament of the feminist project in the current moment and imagine possible productive futures for it, by bringing insights from memory studies to life narrative analysis and mapping the particular trajectory of the concept of intersectionality in the context of India.