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Rajat Nayyar

Graduate Associate

rajatn[at]yorku.ca

Doctoral Candidate

Graduate Programme in Theatre & Performance Studies, York University


Research Keywords:

Voice; vocal traditions; digital practices; possible/impossible world-making; fiction film/future-making; rural north India


Research Region(s):

India, South Asia

Rajat Nayyar is an anthropologist and a filmmaker with an MA in Audiovisual Ethnography from Tallinn University. He is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Theatre & Performance Studies at York University, where his research focus is on voice, vocal traditions, digital practices, possible/impossible world-making and fiction film/future-making in rural north India.

Rajat's recent chapter, “Staging Care: Dying, Death and Possible Futures,” examines sensory audiovisual ethnography in his study of the distinctive politics-of-care staged by families who anticipate and create the possibility of Moksha for their dying relative in Kashi, India's holy city. He is curating Talking Uncertainty (an online talk series/podcast), developing Emergent Futures CoLab, and co-editing the Performance Ethnography section of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. He is also the founder of Espírito Kashi,
a project that facilitates performative spaces for rural Indian communities to critically re-imagine folklore, envision new socialities, digital realities, decolonize archives and film futures.


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