What Goes Into an Outlook? Notes on Commodity Prices in Indian Agri-Markets
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
About the Speaker:
Mekhala Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar University (SNU). Over the last decade, her research, policy, and professional engagements have involved work across a number of field sites and subjects, including women’s courts and dispute resolution, community health workers and public health systems, agricultural commodity markets and regulation, and rural development, livelihoods, and land acquisition. She is currently completing a book manuscript that traverses three decades of transformation in the social, economic, and political lives of an agricultural market (mandi) town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Dr. Krishnamurthy earned her Ph.D. from University College London (UCL) and was a CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow from 2010-12.
About the Lecture:
The economic and political volatility of India’s agricultural commodity prices is as well-known as it is little understood. But this relationship, between material urgency and conceptual ambiguity, is at the very heart of how markets for agricultural produce work and are experienced every day. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the matter of price. Drawing on multiple seasons of ethnographic fieldwork in an agricultural market in central India, Dr. Krishnamurthy will illustrate this relationship and its effects through a close look at a global commodity (soybean) and the making and manifesting of its post-harvest price in regional and local markets in India.