Editorial Note, Jul-Aug, 2023

This issue of Social Scientist, guest-edited by Indu Agnihotri, brings together a set of papers on the lives of women focusing on issues of work and livelihood, interwoven with their daily struggles in different regions of India. The papers are mostly drawn from doctoral research, undertaken in different universities. Embedded within diverse disciplinary locations, the scholars approach their subject of enquiry while engaging with works which, to start with, invisibilised women’s economic contributions under the rubric of an overarching gender identity, or, encased these in a moral web to mask economic motivations. Both with reference to the past and more contemporary locations, the papers convey the need for a more consistent engagement with issues of women’s work, especially in the wake of the neo-liberal push.