Shivani Gupta

Shivani Gupta is a feminist anthropologist interested in examining how everyday gendered experiences, in urban settings, are articulated and negotiated by gender minorities through precepts of violence, surveillance, mobilities, fear, morality, and honor rooted in social structures. She uses ethnographic, feminist and phenomenology approaches to investigate social issues of gender, sexuality, violence, urbanism, spatiality, subversions, everyday, and pedagogy.

She received her PhD from the department of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, following an MA from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University (India). Prior to joining NUS College as a lecturer, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Communications and New Media department, at NUS, on a project that investigated campus sexual violence (including technology-facilitated) in Singapore.

The project

Title: Methods of Caring: A New Approach to Sexual Violence in Institutions of Higher Learning

"The world has not been the same since 2017 when #metoo movements in various parts of the world made sexual violence not an extraordinary event but an everyday reality that exists as an ‘open secret.’ In the last few years, the institutions in the Global North and South have come to reckon with the gender and sexual violence that plague its institutions of higher education. It has been found that 4 in 10 students experience gender and sexual violence in some form, mostly from known individuals they trust (Monahan-Kreishman & Ingarfield 2018). Moreover, in France, it was found that 1 in 10 students report incidents of sexual assault, and 1 in 20 report rape (Mathews 2021). Most of these students identify as women, people of color, or non-binary. Transgender students further struggle to explain their violence as they do not fit the heteronormative policies based on the binary of sexes. Moreover, when victim/survivors have come forward they have been met with suspicion, burden of proof and/or shame and guilt, in addition to neglect, further victimization through victim-blaming. Research conducted by Aguilar and Baek (2020) indicates that, ‘students were 1.6 times more likely not to report their experiences compared to faculty. Respondents in the life and physical sciences were 1.7 times more likely not to report their experiences when compared to respondents in other disciplines. Moreover, Spencer et. al (2017) note that victims/survivors were reluctant to report incidents for various reasons – fear of reprisals from perpetrators and the institution, victim-blaming, and feelings of shame. As seen in France, Just 11 per cent had reported anything to their university, with around a third of respondents saying that it would be "useless" to do so or that if they did make a report, it would not be taken “seriously (Mathew 2021)."

Institution: Sciences Po

Selective bibliography

• Gupta, S. 2024. Mapping Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence in Singapore. In Skoric MM & Natalie Pang (ed.) Research Handbook on Social Media and Society. Edgar and Elgar Publishing Limited: Massachusetts [Co-authored with Torres FLM., Rosamor‘n Doen SYX., Lee J., Wadhwa B., & Ho M.]
• Gupta S. 2023. Risk and the Everyday: Potentialities, Gendered Mobilities, Women’s Worlds in Banaras, Gender, Place & Culture 31(2): 216-239.
• Gupta, S. 2023. Patriarchal Territoriality: Women and the Sacred City of Banaras. In: Millie, J. (ed.) The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific: Religious Efficacy of Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan: Singapore.
• Gupta, S. 2022 Risk: A Feminist Keyword, Feminist Anthropology 3 (2): 336-344 [Special Issue: Feminist Keywords].
• Gupta, S. 2020. Everyday Classrooms: Feminist Pedagogy in #MeToo Era. eSymposium-ISA 10(1).