Pratiti Ghosh (Her/ She)

Pratiti Ghosh is a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Professor Cathy Turner. Her research is situated at the intersection of cultural politics, cultural political economy, critical heritage studies, and contemporary social theory. Trained in both History and Economics, and holding a postgraduate degree from Cambridge, she examines the dynamic relationship between culture, power, and political-economic structures, with particular attention to the ways cultural practices, institutions, and systems of knowledge are shaped by processes of governance, marketisation, nationalism, globalisation, and social transformation.

Working from an interdisciplinary and critically informed perspective, Pratiti approaches culture not as a neutral repository of tradition but as a contested field in which power is produced, negotiated, and legitimised. Her research explores how cultural forms become implicated in projects of nation-building, identity formation, heritage construction, and ideological reproduction, while also serving as sites of resistance, negotiation, and social change. Drawing on cultural political economy, postcolonial theory, political sociology, and critical cultural studies, she investigates how cultural value is produced, circulated, institutionalised, and contested within shifting political and economic contexts.

A central focus of her scholarship is the political economy of culture. She is particularly interested in how cultural production is embedded within wider structures of capital accumulation, labour relations, policy frameworks, and systems of governance. Her work interrogates the mechanisms through which cultural authority is established, maintained, and challenged, examining the interplay between symbolic power, cultural legitimacy, creative labour, heritage economies, and the commodification of culture. Through this lens, she analyses how cultural practices are mobilised in relation to questions of migration, diaspora, gender, inequality, and transnational exchange, revealing the ways in which culture both reflects and shapes broader social and political processes.

Alongside her academic research, Pratiti has cultivated a multidisciplinary career spanning media, education, and the arts. Her experience as an international news professional with All India Radio provided direct engagement with global political and cultural developments, while her work as a filmmaker has explored questions of cultural memory, identity, and social transformation. These experiences have deepened her interest in the production, mediation, and circulation of cultural narratives within public and institutional spheres.

Her doctoral research investigates the historical formation, institutionalisation, and contemporary transformation of cultural traditions within changing political-economic landscapes. Employing archival research, ethnography, and critical cultural analysis, she examines how cultural practices are continuously reconfigured in response to evolving structures of power, mobility, governance, and economic restructuring. Particular attention is given to the tensions between cultural preservation and innovation, authenticity and adaptation, local identities and global flows, as well as the increasingly complex relationship between heritage and market forces. In doing so, her work contributes to wider debates on cultural policy, heritage governance, creative economies, and the political uses of culture in the twenty-first century.

Across her scholarship, public engagement, and creative practice, Pratiti seeks to advance critical understandings of how culture operates as both a site and instrument of power. Her work foregrounds the role of cultural practices in shaping social imaginaries, political subjectivities, and economic relations, contributing to contemporary debates on cultural politics, cultural governance, heritage, and the cultural dimensions of social and economic change. Through this research, she aims to illuminate the ways culture participates in the ongoing negotiation of power, value, identity, and belonging in an increasingly interconnected world.