Books, documentaries and long reads
Every book, film and long read the newsletter has recommended, by edition.
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March 2026
Books & Long Reads, from The Research Rundown — March 2026 Edition, 2026-03-18.
On decolonising methods: Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies (now in its third edition) remains the canonical text. Caroline Lenette’s Participatory Action Research: Ethics and Decolonisation (Oxford University Press, 2022) is the more practical companion for development researchers who are actually designing fieldwork. Between the two, you have the theory and the praxis.
On Indian labour: Jan Breman’s ethnographic work on footloose labour and the informal economy in Gujarat reads, uncomfortably, as a near-perfect description of conditions in today’s platform-based gig work. Footloose Labour (1996) and At Work in the Informal Economy of India (2013) are worth revisiting alongside the Economic Survey data. The continuities are not coincidental.
Long read of the edition: IDR’s “What the Data Reveals About India’s Gig Workers” (January 2026) — careful, evidence-driven, and honest about what we do not yet know—one of the better synthesis pieces to come out of the Budget season.
September 2025
Books & Long Reads, from The Research Rundown - August 2025 Edition (erm… in September), 2025-09-01.
“Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia”
| Amazon | HarperCollins India |
I just finished Sam Dalrymple’s masterpiece, and wow—this delivers exactly what development economists need to understand about South Asian political economy. Dalrymple traces how a single imperial entity evolved into twelve modern nations through five partitions, but what makes this essential reading is the focus on the human stories behind the political decisions. For development practitioners, this illuminates how seemingly discrete policy decisions create cascading effects across generations—exactly the systems thinking our field needs.
Essential Academic Research
The widowhood mortality research in Demography completely upends conventional wisdom about gender and mortality patterns in India. Using longitudinal data tracking individuals across seven years, the study finds no mortality differences between widowed and married adults over 60—but significantly elevated mortality for both widows and widowers aged 25-59.
The Menopause Knowledge Crisis
Anushay’s Substack piece on the menopause knowledge crisis deserves widespread attention from development economists. She argues that our research on women’s economic participation during their cycle misses crucial transitions affecting nearly half the global population. We have extensive literature on fertility transitions, but almost nothing on how menopause affects labour force participation, healthcare costs, or intergenerational transfers.
Free Quality Literature
Standard Ebooks provides beautifully formatted, free public domain literature that respects your intelligence. Perfect for research breaks when your brain craves narrative over analysis.
June 2025
| *Two books, from [The Research Rundown | June 2025](/SignalStack/archive/2025-06-26-the-research-rundown-june-2025-edition.html), 2025-06-26.* |
Caste: A Global Story by Suraj Milind Yengde
Published in India in June 2025, Yengde’s new book pushes caste beyond the familiar frame of a social hierarchy contained within India. He follows caste and anti-caste politics across migration, empire and diaspora, from indentured labour in the Caribbean to contemporary South Asian communities in Britain, North America, Africa and the Gulf.
The comparative ambition is the interesting part. Yengde places Dalit politics alongside Black political thought and asks where analogies between caste and race are illuminating and where they break down. He also examines a question that receives less attention in Indian discussions of migration: what happens to caste when South Asians leave South Asia?
The book combines historical material, archival research and ethnographic work. It is an argument rather than a neutral survey, with Yengde making an explicit case for an international anti-caste politics.
That makes it worth reading alongside work that treats caste principally as an Indian administrative or electoral category. Mobility changes the institutional setting. It does not necessarily dissolve hierarchy.
Suraj Milind Yengde. 2025. Caste: A Global Story. Allen Lane.
Publisher page:
https://www.penguin.co.in/book/caste/
Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
This is from 2020 rather than new work. It stays on my reading list because its central question has aged well: how does power enter data collection, classification, analysis and presentation?
The book is particularly good on categories that appear technically neutral but carry political histories, invisible labour inside data systems, and the idea that data never arrive without context.
For researchers working with administrative data or large household surveys, the challenge is useful precisely because we can become accustomed to treating the variables we inherit as though the categories were self-evident.
The whole book is legally available online from MIT Press:
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/
April 2025
| *Documentary, from [The Research Rundown | April 2025](/SignalStack/archive/2025-04-28-the-research-rundown-april-2025-edition.html), 2025-04-28.* |
Writing with Fire
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s 2021 documentary follows journalists from Khabar Lahariya, the rural news organisation led by Dalit women, as its reporters move from print towards digital journalism.
The film is about journalism. It is also about caste, gender, technology and institutions.
One reason it belongs in a research newsletter is that the reporters repeatedly demonstrate something field researchers should recognise. People who live within a political and social setting often know where to look before an outsider has worked out what the relevant question is.
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Official site:
https://www.writingwithfire.in/
April 2025
| *Books, from [The Research Rundown | April 2025](/SignalStack/archive/2025-04-28-the-research-rundown-april-2025-edition.html), 2025-04-28.* |
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
At the time of this issue, Heart Lamp has just been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. It is the first Kannada work to reach the International Booker shortlist.
The collection brings together twelve stories written by Banu Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023 and translated by Deepa Bhasthi. They centre women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India, with caste, religion, marriage, law and family authority running through their everyday lives.
Mushtaq is a writer, lawyer and activist. That matters to the fiction without turning the stories into disguised case studies.
International Booker shortlist, announced 8 April 2025:
Book page:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/heart-lamp
From the archive: Rakku’s Story by Sheila Zurbrigg
Published in 1984, Rakku’s Story: Structures of Ill-Health and the Source of Change remains worth revisiting.
Zurbrigg works from the life of Rakku, a Dalit woman in rural Tamil Nadu, to examine illness through labour, nutrition, caste, gender and political economy. The book belongs to an older tradition of social medicine in which poor health is treated as an outcome of material and social relations rather than a collection of individual risk factors.
Some of its language and analytical framing belong to its period. The underlying question has aged rather well: what becomes visible when we begin with a person’s life rather than with the disease category?
Internet Archive record:
https://archive.org/details/rakkusstorystruc0000zurb
June 2024
| *One book, from [The Research Rundown | June 2024](/SignalStack/archive/2024-06-05-the-research-rundown-june-edition.html), 2024-06-05.* |
Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
The title did its marketing job. The more serious argument concerns the relationship between economic systems, social provision and women’s material independence.
Ghodsee draws on her research on women’s lives in Eastern Europe before and after the transition from state socialism. She asks what happens to gender relations when health care, childcare, employment and social security are treated as collective institutions rather than private household responsibilities.
You do not have to accept every part of the argument to find the question useful.
Economic systems enter intimate life through time, money and dependence. That is difficult to see when “the household” appears in economic models as a single decision-making unit.
Publisher page: