Urmitapa Dutta.

Urmitapa Dutta, Ph.D.

Professor

College
Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (FAHSS)
Department
Psychology
Phone
978-934-2227
Office
Coburn Hall, Room 330
Email
Urmitapa_Dutta@uml.edu
Links

Expertise

Critical community psychology; Global South feminist and decolonial praxis; epistemic violence and epistemic justice; structural and cultural violence; critical participatory and action research; critical qualitative methodologies; citizenship, belonging, migration, and mobility justice.

Research Interests

Grounded in Global South feminist decolonial praxis, Urmitapa Dutta’s scholarship seeks to understand and disrupt normalized everyday violence (direct, structural, and symbolic) across the spaces she is rooted in, and those that she transgresses. Her decolonial praxis is profoundly shaped by her experiences growing up in the Northeastern borderlands of India, amidst complex and convoluted forms of belonging, marginality, and exclusions. Working transnationally, she uses critical qualitative methodologies to interrogate the linkages between epistemic violence and myriad forms of domination codified by (settler) colonial modes of knowledge production. She approaches decolonial praxis as a powerful mode of centering lived realities and voices of communities at the margins of national and global imaginaries. Her community-engaged activist scholarship (re)centers Global South and majority world peoples as epistemic subjects or knowledge producers. She engages in collaborative research, teaching, community action, and multivocal writing from relationally rooted places that contend with complex relationships to hegemonic power. Through this work, she seeks to denaturalize oppressive conditions and articulate experiences and knowledges silenced by officially sanctioned narratives. She is currently working in solidarity with Miya people in Northeast India to theorize “from below” and (co)create communities of resistance against coloniality and state violence.

Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy(Ph D:) Clinical Community Psychology, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
    • Minor in Qualitative Inquiry
  • Master of Arts (M.A.): Psychology (Clinical Psychology focus), University of Dehli
  • Bachelor of Arts (B.A.): Psychology (Honors), Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi

Biosketch

Teaching and Mentoring

Dutta approaches teaching as a form of political education and collective inquiry. Her courses center critical engagement with power, history, place, and knowledge while asking how psychology can work in solidarity with communities at the frontlines of injustice.

Selected courses designed and taught include:

  • Critical Participatory and Action Research
  • Witnessing Otherwise: Decolonial Methodologies of Resistance
  • Qualitative Research Methods
  • Community-based Approaches to Peacebuilding
  • Advanced Community Dynamics
  • Introduction to Community Social Psychology
  • Seminar in Social (In)Justice
  • Culture and Psychology

Selected Awards and Honors

  • Featured scholar profile and interview, Voices of Decolonial Feminist Psychology, Psychology's Feminist Voices (2026)
  • Fellow, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, American Psychological Association (APA) Division 9 and Society for Community Research and Action, APA Division 27.
  • Professor Extraordinarius, Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa.
  • Best Community Paper Award, Community Research and Development Division, Society for the Study of Social Problems (2024).
  • Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, APA Division 9 (2024).
  • Outstanding Educator Award, Society for Community Research and Action, APA Division 27 (2021).
  • Distinguished Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry Award, APA Division 5 (2020).

Selected Publications

Selected Funded Projects

  • 2025-2027. Storytelling as Survival: Digital Media Innovation for Miya Community Justice. Omega Resilience Award Research Grant, Commonweal Foundation; $25,000; Principal Investigator/Project Lead.
  • 2025-2026. Narratives of Survival in an Age of Social and Ecological Crisis. ORA Narrative Research Grant, Oak Foundation; $25,000; Principal Investigator, with Co-PIs Ireri Bernal and Alisha Solomon.
  • 2024-2025. Our Homes Are Made of Papers: Combating Ethnic Violence and Persecution through a Docudrama-based Peace Education Initiative. Small Grants Program, Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, APA Division 48; $4,000; Principal Investigator.
  • 2023-2025. The Itamugur Community Media Initiative: Combating Ethnoracial Persecution of Miya Communities in Northeast India. Action for Racial Justice and Equity Fund, Society for Community Research and Action; $3,000; Principal Investigator.

Selected Contracts, Fellowships, Grants and Sponsored Research

  • Negotiating belonging and citizenship in Southern contexts (2018), Grant - National Research Foundation, South Africa - Dutta, U. (Co-Investigator)
  • Youth perspectives on Lowell: A community-based digital storytelling project (2018), Grant - UMass Lowell 2020 Community Impact Grant - Dutta, U. (Co-Principal), Vinson, J.E. (Co-Principal)
  • Exploring women’s perspectives on conflict and peacebuiding in Garo Hills (2015), Grant - Center for Women and Work - Dutta, U.
  • Youth perspectives on community violence: A participatory action research project (2013), Grant - Internal Seed Grant (Public Service Award) - Dutta, U.
  • Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Graduate Fellowship (2010), Fellowship - University of Illinois Urbana Champaign - Dutta, U.
  • Junior Research Fellowship (2010), Fellowship - American Institute of Indian Studies - Dutta, U.