Winner of the Marta Danylewycz Memorial Fund Prize, 2023

Please join us in congratulating Madhulagna Halder whose project “Carceral Stories: Women Political Prisoners, Rights, and the ‘Law of Exception’ in India, 1967-1985” is the recipient of the 2023 Marta Danylewycz Memorial Fund Prize. Halder’s project examines the everyday lives of female political prisoners in South Asian prisons during a period of mass incarceration. Using oral histories, autobiographies, visual and literary sources, newspapers, and political journals, her work explores women’s gendered and caste/class experiences of confinement, as well as the contested category of “political prisonhood” and the gendered meanings of political action. Halder’s work, like Marta Danylewycz’s, is devoted to using feminist methodologies and analysis to centre marginalized women’s life stories.