Sohini Datta is a political scientist and researcher whose work examines how power is reproduced through gender, labour, sexuality, caste, race, and knowledge production. A Senior Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the University of North Bengal, she has taught political science and gender studies across several Indian universities and has presented her research internationally. Her scholarship spans political sociology, feminist theory, postcolonial and decolonial thought, sexuality studies, and critical pedagogy.

Her research consistently asks how institutions decide which bodies, forms of labour, identities, and ways of knowing become visible, legitimate, and valuable, and which are rendered invisible or dismissed. Recent publications explore subjects ranging from women's invisible agricultural labour under colonial and neoliberal restructuring to scientific racism, decolonial pedagogy, and the politics of sexual knowledge in South Asia. Her work combines historical inquiry with contemporary social analysis, tracing how systems of power continue to shape everyday life across generations. 

In this episode of The Negotiations, Sohini joins The Dignity Accord to examine gender not simply as a question of identity, but as one of society's earliest systems of classification and regulation. Drawing on her research across gender, labour, sexuality, and political theory, the conversation explores how people learn gender, how institutions reward conformity and punish deviation, and what these dynamics reveal about broader negotiations of legitimacy, recognition, and human dignity. Rather than treating gender as an isolated issue, the discussion approaches it as a window into the wider processes through which societies define what is considered normal, intelligible, and acceptable, inviting a deeper conversation about the relationship between identity, power, and dignity.

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