Swasti Mitter

Swasti Mitter (22 May 1939 – 1 May 2016)[1] was a researcher into gender and development. She held posts as Professor of Gender and Technology at the University of Brighton, and as a deputy director of the UNU Institute of New Technologies at the University of Maastricht (Now UNU-MERIT). Her main area of research involved exploring the ways Information Technologies have influenced employment patterns for women in less developed countries.[2]

Life

Mitter was born in Baharampur, West Bengal, India on 22 May 1939. Her father, Sasankasekhar Sanyal was a politician and her mother Usha Rani.[3] She was educated at Presidency College and Krishnath College. Against her parents' wishes she married in 1960 Partha Mitter and they had two children together.[3] They moved to the United Kingdom, where she studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge.[1]

In the early 1970s, she traveled to Sonarpur to research peasant uprisings, publishing a paper on the subject Peasant Movements in West Bengal in 1977. An academic post in 1974 at Brighton Polytechnic led to a professorial position at what had become the University of Brighton in 1993, in gender and technology.[1] Whilst at Brighton, she published two books, Common Fate: Common Bond in 1986, about the poor working conditions of women in export processing zones, and Computer-aded Manufacturing and Women's Employment in 1992.[3] From 1994 to 2000, Mitter was deputy director of INTECH.[1]

On 1 May 2016, Mitter died at Churchill Hospital, Oxford due to cancer and pneumonia.[3]

Selected publications
  • Mitter, S. (1986). Common fate, common bond: Women in the global economy. London: Pluto.[4][5]
  • Mitter, S., & Rowbotham, S. (1995). Women encounter technology: Changing patterns of employment in the Third World. London: Routledge.
  • Mitter, S., Pearson, R., Ng, C., & International Labour Organization. (1992). Global information processing: The emergence of software services and data entry jobs in selected developing countries. Geneva: ILO.

References
  1. Rowbotham, Sheila (14 June 2016). "Swasti Mitter obituary". The Guardian.
  2. British Academy: Craft and World Commerce - Participant's Biography - Swasti Mitter (2005) Archived 2012-07-23 at archive.today (Accessed March 2012)
  3. Rowbotham, Sheila (9 January 2020). "Mitter [née Sanyal], Swasti (1939–2016)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 9 May 2020.
  4. Banarjee, R. (January 01, 1988). Common fate, common bond: women in the global economy. Feminist Review, 30, 118-120
  5. Bučar, M. (1987). Swasti Mitter: Common fate, common bond. Women in global economy: Pluto Press, London, 1986. 177 p. International Monetary System and Developing Countries, 177-178.
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