Amrita Pande is Professor of Sociology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, globalisation and the intimate, with a focus on transnational reproduction, repro-genetic technologies, and multimodal ethnography. Her most recent books include Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (With Chaturvedi and Daya, Wits and NYU Press, 2023), Birth Controlled: Selective Reproduction and Neo Eugenics in India and South Africa (Manchester Univ Press, 2022), and Scripting defiance: Four Sociological Vignettes (With Ari Sitas, Sumangala Damodaran, Wiebke Keim, and Nicos Trimikliniotis, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press, 2022). Her award-winning book Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) has recently been released in India (Primus Press).
Over the past two decades she has conducted multi-sited research on fertility clinics, travelling egg provision and cross-border surrogacy in India, Cambodia, Ghana and South Africa. She has written for national newspapers across the world and has appeared in Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey’s Newstalk on Irish radio, DR2 Deadline on Danish National television, TRT world, Turkey, and on SABC2 and SAfM, South Africa to discuss her work on the global fertility industry. She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a performance lecture series, Made in India: Notes from a Baby farm (co-produced by Riksteatern, Sweden and Global Studies Production, Denmark) based on her ethnographic work on surrogacy.
In 2022 Amrita started the Women Walk at Midnight (WWaM) movement in South Africa, to normalise the presence of women in public spaces at night. As the founder of WWaM South Africa, she addressed the 23rd International Walk21 Conference, in Kigali, Rwanda. In 2024, she will be a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation in Social Science, Boston University; Department of Sociology and Women’s Studies Research centre, Brandeis University and the Institut Convergence Migrations, Paris.