AIIS Book Prizes Awarded To Darshana Mini and Vibhuti Ramachandran.

American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Book Prizes have been awarded to Darshana Mini and Vibhuti Ramachandran. The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities was awarded to Darshana Mini for Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India. She is an Assistant Professor of Film at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences was awarded to Vibhuti Ramachandran for “Immoral Traffic”: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India. She is an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California. An anthropologist, her research revolves around law and society, gender and sexuality, South Asian studies, critical NGO studies, global studies, and critical approaches to human rights and humanitarianism.

Darshana Mini’s work will be published by the University of California Press in August 202. The work examines formal and informal media infrastructures, labour practices and cinematic cultures associated with soft-porn cinema through a feminist”s lens. Mini writes about soft porn from various perspectives: industrial, regulatory, cultural, production, exhibition, and reception. Examining the soft porn industry’s utilization of gendered labour and trust-based arrangements, the author also shows how actresses and lower-rung production personnel negotiated their social lives marked by their involvement with a tabooed form.

The AIIS Book Prise committee praised Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s work saying that it is the first book-length study of soft-porn in India and described it as an “original, timely, and fascinating account of Malayalam soft-porn cinema as an industry and genre.

Notably, Vibhuti Ramachandran’s work will be published by Cambridge University Press as part of its book series, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Her book “Immoral Traffic”: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India aimed at an interdisciplinary readership interested in anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical approaches to NGOs and humanitarianism.

It carries the readers to the complex intersections of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking campaigns and postcolonial Indian law. It foregrounds the significant role NGOs and legal actors play in suturing and implementing these interventions, examines their impact on sex workers, and centres on how sex workers navigate them.

The work further takes the readers to the complex intersections of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking campaigns and postcolonial Indian law. It foregrounds the significant role NGOs and legal actors play in suturing and implementing these interventions, examines their impact on sex workers, and centers how sex workers navigate them.

The Prize Committee noted the book’s excellent ethnographic study of the sites and processes involved in the contemporary Indian state’s governance of prostitution.