Atreyee Sen awarded prize for best journal article

What socio-economic factors lie behind the emergence of women’s virtue vigilante groups in Mumbai, India, where ‘respectable women’ actively participate in cleansing the cityscape of what they believe to be sexual vulgarity in public? And how does such moral policing, which involves daily surveillance over open displays of love in poor and peripheral localities, challenge the hegemony of police governance?

These key questions are addressed in the article ‘No City for Lovers: Anti-Romeo Squads, Resistance, and the Micro-politics of Moral Policing in an Indian City’, which has now been selected as the winner of the first annual Critical Asian Studies prize for the year’s best article.

An interdisciplinary panel of judges cited the richness of empirical research and the broad spectrum of scholarship included in the article. They noted that Sen’s work enables theorising about such cross-cultural phenomena as resilience, resistance, and indigeneity without relying on jargon, or becoming detached from the local reality of the topic under research.

While choosing the article for this honour, the judges noted further that the work contributes to discussion of the subject matter across disciplines, interpretive frameworks, and area focus.

Read the article here: article ‘No City for Lovers: Anti-Romeo Squads, Resistance, and the Micro-politics of Moral Policing in an Indian City’