Urmitapa Dutta

Urmitapa Dutta, Ph.D. is leading two ORA Research Grants, including Storytelling as Survival: The Itamugur Community Media Initiative for Miya Rights and Recognition as well as a project to understand the narratives of culture and the arts that exists within community-based projects within the larger ORA community.  

Urmitapa Dutta is a community psychologist, scholar-activist, and educator whose work is  rooted in transnational feminist and decolonial frameworks. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she also serves as  the Chair of the UMass Lowell Greeley Peace Scholar Program. Her research and praxis are  deeply informed by long-standing commitments to resisting structural violence and amplifying  community-based knowledges as sources of radical imagination and transformative justice. 

Raised in the Northeastern borderlands of India and now living in the U.S., Urmitapa brings a  transnational consciousness to her work—navigating and interrogating power across borders,  identities, and academic spaces. Her scholarship centers the everyday experiences of  marginalization and resistance, particularly as they emerge through intersecting structures of  oppression. She has collaborated with community organizers, artists, and activist collectives  across India, U.S., and South Africa with a focus on co-creating liberatory knowledge and  fostering spaces for collective healing. 

Urmitapa is recognized for her expertise in decolonial, participatory, arts-based, and narrative  research methodologies. Her work pushes methodological boundaries by integrating critical  qualitative approaches that are grounded in relational ethics, epistemic justice, and solidarity  praxis. She frequently engages in transdisciplinary, community-driven research that foregrounds  lived experience, intergenerational storytelling, and creative expression as vital forms of  knowledge production. Her long-standing partnerships with indigenous and other persecuted  communities in Northeast India exemplifies this praxis: together they have co-produced research  and art that foregrounds the creative strategies these communities use to navigate dispossession,  gendered violence, and ecological precarity. Her scholarship also critically examines how  community psychology can be reimagined through solidarities across the Global South in ways  that refuse colonial legacies of knowledge production. Her co-authored works with community  partners and students have appeared in Qualitative Inquiry, American Journal of Community  Psychology, Journal of Peace Psychology, and the Journal of Social Issues and several  decolonial community psychology handbooks. 

As an educator, Urmitapa is deeply committed to co-learning pedagogies that challenge  dominant epistemologies and nurture students’ capacities for critical consciousness and social transformation. She works to create classroom spaces that honor embodied knowledge, dialogue,  and relational accountability. She mentors students—particularly those from first-generation,  immigrant, and BIPOC backgrounds—who are seeking to build liberatory lives and research in  service of justice.