Supervisors: Jr. Prof. Carola Lorea and Prof. Isabel Laak

Souraja Chakraborty completed her Bachelor’s degree (2021) and Master’s Degree (2023) in Sociology from Presidency University Kolkata, India and is pursuing a PhD in Cultures of Global South at the University of Tübingen since 1st November, 2023. She is also a part of the PhD Programme Collocations- Constructing Interknowledges, Negotiating Proximities. Her project aspires to find alternative forms of theorizing about labour in the traditional art of folk and classical stringed instrument making in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, India. In doing so, she hopes to reach a dialogue between phenomenology of sound and body as well as oral and codified knowledge systems among the makers and players of stringed instruments that dictate how sound is heard and recreated through bodies and also transform such bodies in the act of making and sounding the instruments. She wishes to employ sonic ethnography which moves away from the ocular-centric traditional method of doing ethnography by “looking at” subjects, and posit this method in counter to the Global Northern gaze.