Bijoyetri Samaddar
Sociology
Biography
| Previous Institution(s) | |
| J-PAL South Asia, Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC, Ashoka), Tata Institute of Social Sciences | |
| Areas of Research Interest related to South Asia | |
| Bureaucratic discretion and access to state services in India Measurement of trust, compliance, and fairness in public health and education interventions Institutional memory and historical legacies of state violence (e.g., Emergency-era sterilizations) Natural experiments in urban infrastructure and environmental inequality Mixed-methods and causal inference approaches in public policy, sociology and economics Cultural and cognitive activation of constructs in survey and ethnographic research across linguistic and regional contexts | |
| Areas of Research Interest beyond South Asia | |
| Measurement validity in cross-cultural causal inference Construct instability and interpretive drift in survey design Social policy, epistemic inequality, and institutional neglect in marginalized communities Comparative frameworks of public trust and institutions Psychometric tools and Item Response Theory applied to cultural cognition Data politics, shadow networks, and moral economies of access | |
| List of published and non-published works | |
| Tagat, A., & Samaddar, B. (2025). Language capital and grade repetition: evidence from nationally-representative survey data in India. Education Economics, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2024.2448661 | |
| What is your favorite part about CSA? | |
| CSA creates an interdisciplinary space that values methodological pluralism and regional specificity. I particularly appreciate its commitment to critical scholarship that challenges dominant development discourses while staying grounded in historical and cultural nuance. | |
| Hobbies | |
| Archival digging and old map collecting, English and Bengali poetry and literature, Making niche memes about causal inference, Foucault and fieldwork, Urban walks in unfamiliar cities and countryside. | |
| Favorite part of living in Madison | |
| Long solitary walks by the lakes, watching people come and go at the Memorial Union Terrace, and feeling like I’m quietly collecting scenes. I listen to podcasts, music, and have recently started curating a small collection of weird art — things that often make me feel something ambiguous. Madison gives me the space to think, observe, and disappear into thought, sometimes without pressure, but often as a visible outlier in a sea of people. |