Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department, and Faculty Affiliate at the South Asia Center and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, at the University of Washington Seattle. Her current book project, Home on the Fijian Farmscape: Narrating Attachments to Land and Place Through Agriculture, explores how Indo-Fijians, whose ancestors arrived en masse as indentured laborers to work on sugarcane plantations, remember plantation histories and re-imagine agricultural labor to construct a non-settler local identity. Through multiple government coups and violent anti-Indian rhetoric, indigenous politics in Fiji has repeatedly attempted to render Indo-Fijians alien to lands they consider home. Drawing from ethnographic research among farmers in the Sigatoka Valley, Dey demonstrates how Indo-Fijians narrativize farm practices as simultaneous projects in nation-building, heritage/traditional knowledge preservation, and environmental protection. Thus, Indo-Fijian farmers simultaneously mirror and challenge ethnonationalist interpretations of indigeneity to produce a local identity that protests the exclusivity of belonging in Fiji today.

Through my participation in the GradFUTURES Mentorship program and GradFUTURES Learning Cohorts, I gained a robust professional network, learned more about how to advertise my skillset, and built collaborative research/working relationships within and outside academia. The most meaningful impact in my life, by far, is the psychological "switch" that happened after I started participating with GradFUTURES: I learned that there are opportunities for growth, collaboration, and personal entrepreneurship wherever you look, and often all you have to do is have the initiative to find resources and the confidence to ask. I was honored to serve as a Professional Development Associate with the GradFUTURES program during AY 23-24 to design more programs and opportunities for grad students in the Social Sciences division.

One of my favorite GradFUTURES initiatives was the traveling Learning Cohort program, where graduate students travel to metropolitan areas to learn more about the professional opportunities in humanities/social sciences fields. I participated in the NYC trip in AY 22-23 and was inspired by the fields of museum studies, curatorship, and theater production, and since incorporated my learnings into my dissertation research and public communication of scholarly ideas.