Counter-Stories of Gender-Marginal Academics in Indian Universities: An Intersectional Archive (1963–2024)

This is a dataset of 44 files of narratives composed from transcripts of oral history accounts by research participants, which were produced as research data for a wider project on marginality in the Indian academy. Overall, 46 people participated in the interview process, invited as socially marginalised, critical scholars who had been employed to work in teaching, research and/or Third Mission (‘extension activities’) in Indian institutions. Ethical conduct was practiced, with informed active consent secured from the 46 participants for all recordings of oral interviews. Pseudonymised narratives were composed from these transcripts. Of the 46 participants, 44 provided their permissions for their narratives to be included in this open access publication. This dataset has been uploaded to the open science repository (‘Zenodo’) where a digital object identifier (DOI) has been registered. The dataset includes: 1. A file titled ‘Read me’ which provides a description of the project, its methodology and authorial attributions, following FAIR principles of open science data management. 2. A file outlining the protocol summary titled ‘Protocol for the composition of life history narratives from interview transcripts’. This provides a description of the guidance followed when composing life history narratives from interview transcripts. 3. A file titled ‘Description of life history narrative files in the dataset’, which includes outline basic information related to each of the 44 individual life history narratives in the dataset. Included is information about (a) the participants’ professional position at the time of data generation, including the subject/ discipline(s) in which they practiced, whether the institution(s) they worked within was private or public, and the institution’s geographic location; (b) an indication of some of the primary markers that interlocked with the gender marginality of that participant’s social or disciplinary location; (c) the language(s) of the original interview. 4. The life history narratives in three folders saved in different formats for prosperity – Microsoft word, Adobe Pdf, and plain text format in folders compressed in zipped and TAR formats. Please note that formatting changes may have impacted tracts of non-Latinate script when saved to plain text format.