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FACULTY

Learning from some of the best minds in education and in the industry

Prof. Tannistha Samanta

Associate Professor – Sociology
Email: tannistha.samanta@flame.edu.in
PhD in Sociology from University of Maryland; M.A in Sociology from University of Maryland; M.Phil in Applied Economics from Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum; M.Sc in Economics, University of Calcutta; B.Sc in Economics from University of Calcutta.
BIO

Tannistha Samanta is a sociologist and an aging studies scholar by training.  She received her Master’s and PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland College Park. Before that, she had obtained graduate-level degrees in Economics from JNU, New Delhi and the University of Calcutta. Broadly, her research lies at the interdisciplinary crossroads of family sociology and gerontology involving themes around living arrangements, social capital, health policy, older adult sexualities and theory development in aging studies. In another line of inquiry, she examines the complex nexus of motherhood, sexual politics and the biomedical markets. Her work has been funded by research grants from the United Nations Population Fund, Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Government of Gujarat, Population Foundation of India, University of California, San Diego (School of Medicine), University of Haifa (Israel) and the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA). Recently, she was invited as a Mercator Fellow (Summer 2024) with the Universities of Tübingen and Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.


Apart from research, she remains committed to student engagement and contributing to an emerging community of early career researchers. In this role, she has mentored several graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and have served on academic committees and curriculum development boards.


Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of the journal, The Sociological Review (SAGE), the Journal of Aging Studies (Elsevier) and Social Theory & Health (Palgrave Macmillan). Prior to joining FLAME University, she was a faculty with the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India, where she taught undergrad and graduate students for about 8 years.


 




https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-1654-7



RESEARCH & PUBLICATIONS

JOURNAL ARTICLES


2025



  • Fletcher, James; Cardamone, E; Hatzifilatitis, S; Samanta, T. Curating the ‘Care-Full’ Home: An Experiment in Satirical Interdisciplinarity in Social Research. Sociological Research Online (SAGE): https://doi.org/10.1177/13607804241299263

  • Samanta, T & Muskaan Pal. (forthcoming). Motherhood, Morality and Miracle: Mediated Representations of Postmenopausal Reproduction in India in Rajan.I (ed). Springer Handbook of Aging, Health and Social Policy in South Asia


2024



  • Samanta, T 2024. Aging, Consumption and Middleclassness: Implications for Intergenerational Relations in India. Consumption & Society, Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000024

  • Ronanki, S; Samanta, T & S Rajpal (2024). Assessing Economic Dependency Among Indian Elderly: Evidence from Nationally Representative Household Survey, 2018, S. I. Rajan (ed.), Handbook of Aging, Health and Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1914-4_246-1

  • Tripathi, A., & Samanta, T. (2024). Third Agers in India: Empirical Evidence From Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), 2017–2018. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 43(4), 423-436.


2023



  • Tripathi, A and T. Samanta. 2023. “I don’t want to have the time when I do nothing”: Aging and Reconfigured Leisure Practices During the Pandemic. Ageing International. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-023-09519-8 

  • Tripathi, A; Samanta, T. 2023. Social Engagement as leisure: Does it moderate the association between subjective wellbeing and depression in later life? Frontiers in Sociology, Vol 8: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1185794 

  • Samanta, T. 2023. Social Egg-freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging. Journal of Aging Studies, 67 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2023.101183. (Special Issue: Material Gerontology: The co-constitution of Ageing, Bodies, Spaces and Things 

  • Samanta, T (2023) .The Promise of context-specific gerontology in Gerontological Education: Some Reflections on Decolonizing the Field. International Journal of Education & Ageing., Vol 5(3) 

  • Samanta, T (forthcoming). Aging, Consumption and Middleclassness: Implications for Intergenerational Relations in India (edited by Anuja Agarwal, Oxford Series on Family Studies in India) Series Editor: Sujata Patel 

  • Tripathi, A, Samanta, T. Third Agers in India: Empirical Evidence from Longitudinal Aging Studies in India (LASI), 2017-2018 (Journal of Applied Gerontology, forthcoming)

  • Samanta, T & Muskaan Pal. (forthcoming). Motherhood, Morality and Miracle: Mediated Representations of Postmenopausal Reproduction in India in Rajan.I (ed). Springer Handbook of Aging, Health and Social Policy in South Asia


2022



  • T.Samanta, K Gopalan & T Devi. 2022. Blocked by Gender: Disparities in COVID19 infection detection in Tamil Nadu, India. Frontiers in Public Health. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.966490

  • Tripathi, A and T. Samanta. 2022. Leisure as Self-care in the times of the pandemic: Insights from a time-use diary study in India. Leisure Studies (Taylor & Francis) DOI: 10.1080/02614367.2022.2121415

  •  Samanta, T. 2022. “The Lost Daughter”: Gerontological reflections of the Life Course Perspective’s Missing Plot. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, DOI: 10.1080/01634372.2022.2059797

  • Samanta, T. 2022 Foodwork as Foodplay?: New Aging Masculinities in Bollywood cinemaThe Gerontologist Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnac122 (Film and Digital Media).

  • Gosain, Kritika & T. Samanta. 2022. Understanding the role of stigma and misconception in the experience of epilepsy in India: Findings from a mixed-methods study. Frontiers in Sociology. DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.790145

  • Samanta, T. 2022 Review of “The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices by Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike Priddy”, Bloomsbury 2022. The Sociological Review Magazine (July 5)

  • Samanta, T & Muskaan Pal. 2022(forthcoming). Motherhood, Morality and Miracle: Mediated Representations of Postmenopausal Reproduction in India in Rajan.I (ed). Springer Handbook of Aging, Health and Social Policy in South Asia


2021



  • *Samanta, T. 2021. This thing called love. The Gerontologist , Oxford Academic (Film and Digital Media) https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnab076

  • *Samanta, T. 2021 Aging, Housing Markets and Social Inclusion: Insights from India. Journal of Aging Studies  (Elsevier), 57 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2021.100939

  • *Samanta, T. 2021. Living solo at midlife: Can the pandemic destigmatize living alone in India? Journal of Aging Studies (Elsevier), 56 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2020.100907

  • *Samanta, T. 2021. Hymen, Interrupted: Negotiating body, markets and consumerist modernity in India, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2021.001

  • *Devi, A; T Samanta & L.H Clark. 2021 Embodied Aging: Everyday body practices and later life identities among South Asian Indian Gujarati Diaspora in Canada, Anthropology & Aging, 42(2). *denotes Flame University affiliation


2020



  • Samanta, T.2020 Of Public spaces and later life amity in urban India: Gerontological musings in pandemic times, Anthropology & Aging, 41(2). https://doi.org/10.5195/aa.2020.313

  • Isaacson, M; Tripathi, A; Samanta, T; D’Ambrosio and Coughlin, J. 2020. Giving voice to the environment as the silent partner in aging: Examing the moderating roles of gender and family structure in older adult wellbeing. International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health., 17(12) https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/12/4373

  • Ray, Debapriya and Samanta, Tannistha. 2020. Motherhood Penalty?: Examining gender, work and family among science professionals in India. Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE Working Paper Series 3(1): 37-5. University of Purdue.

  • Samanta, Tannistha. 2020. Women’s Empowerment as Self-Compassion: Empirical Evidence from India. PLOS One., 15(5): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232526

  • Sharma, Anupam & Samanta, Tannistha*. 2020. Crafting “youthful” desire and “doing” masculinity: Narratives of middle aged to older men in the Grindr grid. Ageing International. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-020-09372-z

  • Samanta, Tannistha. 2020.Aging in e-place: Reflections on online communities for the aged in India. Journal of Women & Aging, Taylor & Francis 32(1): 114-121. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08952841.2019.1681884

  • Samanta, Tannistha. 2020. “Review” of Intersections of Ageing, Gender and Sexualities: Multidisciplinary international perspectives. King, Andrew, Almack, Kathryn and Rebecca L. Jones (eds). Journal of Anthropology & Aging, 41(1): 123-25


BOOK CHAPTERS



  • Samanta, T & Muskaan Pal. 2022(forthcoming). Motherhood, Morality and Miracle: Mediated Representations of Postmenopausal Reproduction in India in Rajan.I (ed). Springer Handbook of Aging, Health and Social Policy in South Asia


GRANTS (2020)



  • Research grant, (P.I) The Minerva Centre for Intersectionality in Aging, University of Haifa, Israel, Successful aging, intimacy and care cultures among LGBTQ older adults in India| 2020-2022


OTHER PUBLICATIONS (MEDIA WRITINGS AND SOCIOLOGY BLOGS)


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