I am an ethnographer, writer & editor based in India. I have been an academic, content and copy editor for nearly two decades. In the course of my career, I have experience working with students, early career researchers, established academics & artists across disciplines & varied delivery formats, from MA, PhD theses, articles for academic publications, public presentations, project reports & more personalised, artistic, reflections. I particularly enjoy & specialise in working in close collaboration with authors in amplifying their original voice by assisting them in refining their argument, sharpening & shaping the structure, and narrative momentum. Drawing on my own experience of leading, designing & conceptualising research projects, I have also worked with researchers to develop project research-specific methodological frameworks.
My Editing portfolio includes authors from eminent universities & diverse backgrounds, both in India & internationally [University of Delhi; Ambedkar University, National University of Singapore, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of Amsterdam, University of Leipzig].
I am seeking editorial commissions from artists, academics, scholars & early career academic researchers to self-finance my ongoing project, particularly from authors whose work has intersections, overlaps, diversions, collaborations & solidarities with mine. For authors in India from marginalised locations, I offer concessional rates, but always firm solidarities. If I am unable to take on the commission for financial reasons, I offer to read the text to provide a detailed overview without any charge within a mutually suitable time limit.
Presently, I am deeply immersed in Marxist philosophy, an obscene amount of Zizek. Thus my days are filled with talks of Hegel, a lot of Lacan, a few folks who explain these mysteries as Zizek explains them, & so on & so forth. To claim my own madness for its revolutionary hysterical-feminine subjectivity, I am sharpening the tools I already have. I am critically engaging with mad studies as a disciplinary location with auto-ethnography as a methodological tool to make sense of the multiplicities of the self that present themselves in my madness using Hegel’s prescription to explore & expose true self-consciousness. For my project, matters of soundscapes as material artefacts, voice & listening as philosophical conundrums are key concerns, for which sound studies & sensorial anthropology are also among the core engagements.
I am particularly keen to work with authors whose work is an inquiry, critique, commentary, &/or poetic catharsis of anything digital, everything of the internet, and whatever there is of AI yet. These concerns are foundational in my inquiries of the self as a field site. My starting point was the deep end of hacker activism. I am one of the signatories (General Secretary) on the forms which registered iLuG-D (linux user’s group, Delhi chapter) as an official body. With those beginnings as a launchpad, particularly to make up for the lack of any coding skills, the manner in which the self flourishes, or withers, & the freedoms of being & becoming that unfold in (& via) these digital, alternate & virtual worlds towards revolutionary futures has been a committed perusal.
I have provided editorial assistance to authors across disciplines: anthropology, sensorial anthropology, sound studies, slum studies, development studies, ethnography, internet & media studies, digital cultures are the few in which, if not an expert, I have an ongoing working knowledge of. Editing is not merely a meal ticket for me, committing oneself to “correct” others’ thoughts without credit & stripped of the capacity to institute disciplinary & punitive acts is a rite of passage to practise kindness & empathy, as acts of solidarities without which revolutionary futures will always be fractured. I therefore don’t have any fixed rates. But in the spirit of recognition of the acts of solidarity, we can deliberate on mutually recognizable fees, rates and delivery timeline for the project.
These are among my commissions, The Politics of Platformization – Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory & The Deep Mellow Valley. To review my detailed CV & academic profile, please visit here.
tripta@gmail.com is my permanent location. I am always available here.
I look forward to hearing from you.