ARADHANA SHARMA
Anu (Aradhana) Sharma is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Economics and Politics from the New School, she completed a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University, and a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University. She has a keen interest in “the political” in its diverse manifestations and at different scales: the everyday politics of survival and life on the margins; the politics of discipline and regulation; the politics of social movements, NGOs, and radical groups; the politics of the state and citizenship; the politics of global governance and aid by international organizations like the World Bank; and finally, the politics of knowledge production. Her geographic focus is South Asia, specifically India. Her first book, Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India, focused on a rural women’s empowerment program started as a partnership between feminist groups and the Indian government to illuminate the paradoxical dynamics and outcomes of empowerment under neoliberalism. She is currently finishing a project on the politics of “good governance” in India that looks at how the law is being mobilized to reform democratic rule, promote state transparency and anticorruption efforts, and to what effect. This project delves into the social life of laws, governance, statehood, citizenship, populism, and activism. Sharma is co-editor, with Akhil Gupta, of The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Her work has also appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including the American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Citizenship Studies, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Anthropology Now. Sharma is currently serving as secretary of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
AMMAN MADAN
Amman Madan is a Professor at the School of Education in Azim Premji University, Bangalore. His research interests are currently in education as a way to deal with social stratification and identity politics and in social theory. He did his M.Sc. in Anthropology with Divyadarshi Kapoor from Punjab University, Chandigarh and then did his M.Phil and Ph.D. with Avijit Pathak at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He worked for a while at the Academic Staff College at JNU, after which he was a full-timer with Eklavya at Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh, from 2000 to 2003. He taught a semester at the HBCSE and then joined the department of Humanities and Social Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, where he regularly received commendations for excellence in teaching. He has been at Azim Premji University since December 2010. He has been guest faculty at TISS and JNU. He is associated with several NGOs including Eklavya and Digantar. He has been on committees of the NCERT and various state education boards. He also a member of the Education Dialogue Trust. He tries to find ways of combining rigorous scholarship with activism and social engagement.
ARJUN SHANKAR
Arjun Shankar is an anthropologist who received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Anthropology and Education in 2016. He currently holds a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Colgate University. His research draws from critical race, visual studies, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial theory, with a focus on poverty alleviation efforts and the help economy in the Global South. He is currently finishing his monograph, entitled Brown Saviors and their Others: Racial Capitalism, Digital Diasporas, and India’s Help Economy. This work critically interrogates the racialized economies associated with global poverty alleviation efforts in India. His book demonstrates how contemporary forms of “help” trope on colonial-era racialized discourses while also overlaying casteist, capitalist, and digital ideologies in order to justify the interventions of upper-caste, technocratic Indian diasporic elites. He is also a visual anthropologist and filmmaker and has published on race, poverty, and visual regimes in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, Visual Anthropology Review, and Visual Communication. Finally, he is also a founder of the interdisciplinary field of curiosity studies. His co-edited volume entitled Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, is due for publication in Spring 2020 with University of Minnesota Press.
ASIM SIDDIQUI
Asim Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Azim Premji University, Bangalore. In his work as a teacher, researcher and socio-cultural worker, he works towards issues of socio-cultural and ecological justice by drawing upon different philosophical traditions from India and outside, in terms of both intellectual and embodied practices. By working both inside academia and outside with social and artistic organizations, he aims to bridge the gap between his research/teaching and social interventions that are pertinent in the contemporary context. His doctoral research was primarily focused on the fundamental philosophical questions on the divide of mind and body, theory and practice, and knowing and being in Ethics/Politics Education. The questions were posited in the larger framework of Decolonization of Education in the Indian context, which led him to an Ambedkarite conception of decolonization. Continuing on the insights from the research, his current educational experiments have been in developing an aesthetic-critical pedagogy for engaging with contemporary cultural-political issues. He also draws substantially on religious traditions and practices to critique the implicit liberal bias in educational research and practices. Outside University, he does dramaturgy, consultancy and experiential education workshops for various art and developmental organizations.
CAROL UPADHYA
Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. She studies a range of social transformations in contemporary India, including processes of spatial and social mobility, the globalisation of cities and provincial towns and the urbanisation of rural landscapes; speculative land and real estate markets and their implications for local communities; and skilling, labour migration, and employment. She recently completed an ethnographic monograph on the Indian software industry, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016). She earlier co-directed the Provincial Globalisation research programme. She has received research grants from the National Science Foundation (USA), Azim Premji Foundation, Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), WOTRO Science for Global Development of the NWO, Netherlands, and the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (Netherlands). She has been a visiting scholar at Central European University, Budapest, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, Germany, and the International Institute of Asian Studies, Amsterdam. She is an Editorial Advisor for the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. Prior to joining NIAS, Carol Upadhya taught in the PG Department of Sociology at SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai.
DIVYA KANNAN
Divya Kannan is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University. Her research interests include histories of education, childhood, gender studies and oral history. She defended her PhD at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on missionary education and lower caste poor in the nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Kerala.
KIM FERNANDES
Kim Fernandes is a joint doctoral student in Education and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. As a sociocultural anthropologist and a statistician, they are interested in the production of government statistics about people with disabilities in India. In particular, their work focuses on how questions of who should be (and who is) counted as disabled influence both identity negotiation and access to resources. They are also interested in the role that ideological beliefs about normalcy and ability play in the formation of bureaucratic facts. They received their M. S. Ed. in Statistics, Measurement, Assessment and Research Technologies from the University of Pennsylvania, their Ed. M. in International Education Policy from Harvard University and their B. S. F. S. in International Politics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. They have previously worked both with children and young adults in a variety of educational settings and on the monitoring and evaluation of large-scale interventions. Their current areas of interest include critical disability studies, youth identity development, urban education, postcolonial studies and the anthropology of quantification.
K. LAXMINARAYANA
K. Laxminarayana is Professor of Economics at the School of Economics in University of Hyderabad
HEM BORKER
Hem Borker is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She earned her DPhil in Education from the University of Oxford on the Clarendon Scholarship. Her research interests include education, social exclusion, gender and youth. She also holds an MA in Social Work from the University of Delhi and a BA in History from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Her ethnographic monograph Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood was recently published by Oxford University Press.
KARISHMA DESAI (Co-Convener)
Karishma Desai is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her research employs anthropological and transnational feminist lenses in the study of gender, globalization, and education to understand contested ways in which norms about gender and childhood are consolidated, translated, and negotiated in educational sites predominantly in India and the United States. Attending to global discourses alongside the everyday embodied and relational cultural lives of young women within unequal educational contexts, her research investigates the kinds of gendered subjectivities and knowledges that are forwarded as desirable within contemporary neoliberal and international development regimes with particular attention to the values, aspirations, and affective orientations that are made available and simultaneously reproduce inequities.
Dr. Desai has published in Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, and Harvard Educational Review, and co-edited a special issue on citizenship and education for Curriculum Inquiry.
Her research and teaching investments stem from her experiences as a classroom teacher in New York City and Chicago, and work with educators and curriculum in the United States, South Asia, and East Africa. Karishma holds a B.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, an Ed.M. in International Educational Development, and a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University.
LEYA MATHEW (Co-Convener)
Leya Mathew is an Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She has a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is focused on understanding the socio-cultural transformations that have accompanied economic liberalization in India. Her dissertation explored non-elite private English schooling as a political expression of aspiration in a new consumer society. Her postdoctoral work at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru (2016-18) focused on the emergence of middle-class feminisms in the context of expanding employment opportunities for women in science and technology. Her current research examines how the linkages between S&T education, specifically ‘medicine’, modernity and middle classness are being reworked in the contemporary moment. Her research has been funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.
MANISH JAIN
Manish Jain is an Associate Professor at the School of Education Studies in Ambedkar University in Delhi. Before joining AUD, he was a part of the Centre for Studies in Sociology of Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. He was instrumental in designing foundational courses of History of Education and Pedagogy of Social Studies for the MA Elementary Education programme at TISS, Mumbai. He has a decade long experience as a school teacher and has taught social science and political science to secondary and senior secondary students. His teaching and research interests lie at the intersections of history, politics, and sociology of education along with an emerging engagement with auto/biographical narratives. These interests find expression in the areas of Histories of education and school disciplines in colonial and post-colonial societies; Memories of School/ing and Teacher’s work and lives; Sociology of Education; Education Policies; Comparative Education; Gender and Education; Social Science Curriculum and Citizenship Education; Urban Inequality and Education; Politics of Textbooks; and Democratic and Critical Pedagogy.
MAITHREYI R (Co-Convener)
Maithreyi’s work spans the areas of childhood studies, education and critical psychology. Following the completion of her doctoral work at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) Bengaluru in 2015, she worked with a not-for-profit research organisation called the Center for Budget and Policy Studies, Bengaluru, till December 2019. She is currently consulting with the Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), on a WHO project on Adolescence in India. Her work has largely been ethnographic in nature, and has focused on skilling and empowerment programmes for youth, early childhood development, and indigeous and tribal education. Her work has been published in various international journals, including Childhood and Comparative Education.
MARY ANN CHACKO (Co-Convener)
Mary Ann Chacko is an Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She has a doctorate in Curriculum Studies from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Her research interests lie at the intersections of anthropology of state and schooling, citizenship pedagogies, and critical childhood studies. Using anthropological methodologies Mary Ann’s current research examines a uniformed youth organization and the different collaborations, educational spaces, and pedagogical practices through which it trains young people to be ‘participatory citizens’ in contemporary India.
MONIKA BANERJEE
Monika Banerjee holds an MPhil and PhD degree from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and a Masters’ degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral thesis focused on examining the modalities through which central government policies related to education get translated and transacted at a local contextual levels. Prior to joining JNU for pursuing an MPhil degree, she worked for a few years in the development sector in India as well as UK. She also worked for a year with the Ministry of Women and Child as a Technical Consultant while pursuing her PhD. Her interest lies in issues of governance, understanding social policy processes in a comparative framework, visibility of deprived and marginalised groups in existing policies and viability of such policies in bringing change. Currently she is working as a Research Fellow with the Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST). Here the main thrust of her work is to build a critical understanding of women’s work and their contribution to the economy through research and dialogue.
NIVEDITA N
Nivedita N. is a PhD scholar in sociology of education at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She locates her research work in the area of social mobility pertaining to Dalits, particularly women, and exploring the intersectionality between caste, gender and social class. As part of her PhD research, she is exploring the life-stories of Dalit women in order to understand their mobility pathways and processes as women belonging to traditionally socially discriminated and educationally disadvantaged groups. The research study focuses on Dalit women in ‘salariat’ occupations in the lower middle class fractions particularly the Class III (clerical cadre) in government services in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Through the lens of Dalit women as members of the middle class negotiating new, unfamiliar socio-economic locations, the study seeks to explore their educational journeys that led them to enter these occupations and their mobility practices in becoming middle class.
PADMA SARANGAPANI
Padma Sarangapani is Professor & Chairperson of the Centre for Education, Innovation and Action Research at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai. She has steered national and international projects on ICTs in education, most notably the Connected Learning Initiative that was recently awarded the UNESCO-King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize in 2018 and the OER Collaboration award for excellence in 2019. She holds a BSc and MSc in Physics and a PhD in Education from the University of Delhi. Her areas of specialisation and research interests in the last ten years are in quality and education, teachers, teaching and teacher education, curriculum studies, indigenous knowledge and knowledge transmission in non-school settings and elementary education. She was a recipient of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Fellowship in 2000 to research Childhood and Indigenous Knowledge Transmission among the Baiga tribes in central India. She has been involved in many important innovative teaching programmes in Education including the Bachelor of Elementary Education at Delhi University and the Masters in Elementary Education in TISS. She has also worked extensively to collaborate with the Government of Karnataka in the District Quality Education Programme with a focus on District and Sub District Resource Institutions. She has authored many papers published in national and international peer reviewed journals and authored one book Constructing School Knowledge published in 2003 by Sage publications.
RASHMI M.
Rashmi M. is an Assistant Professor of English working for the Department of Collegiate Education, Government of Karnataka, and is posted at Government First Grade College Kushalnagar, Kodagu district. She has a PhD degree from National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, and an M.Phil degree from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She researches and publishes in the area of media studies, engaging with the questions related to technology and society. Her doctoral work focused on changing media consumption practices via mobile phones and other peripheral technologies among the digitally marginalized users in Bangalore. More recently, she has developed an interest in sociology of higher education. She translates social sciences and critical theoretical literature between Kannada and English languages. She has been part of Social and Digital Media Fellowship at the Sarai Programme, CSDS, Delhi.
RITTY LUKOSE
Ritty Lukose is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. Her teaching and research interests explore the relations between culture, politics, and economy as they manifest themselves in discourses and practices of gender across the varied terrain of globalization, especially as they impact contemporary South Asia. With a background in anthropology, she is currently interested in the relationship between Western, global and non-Western feminisms. Her research has been funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Program, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Academy of Education, and she has published several book chapters and articles on this research in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Social History, Social Analysis, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Her book, Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India, was published by Duke University Press in 2009 and co-published in India by Orient Blackswan in 2010. A co-edited book, South Asian Feminisms was published by Duke University Press (2012) and Zubaan, a leading feminist press in India. She teaches courses on globalization, India/South Asia, sex/gender and feminisms within global contexts, and ethnography.
RUPAL OZA
Rupal Oza is an associate professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work focuses on political economic transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between development and security. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She has several articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has written on special economic zones, the discourse of security, and Hindutva politics India. Her current project examines the relationship between sexual assault, caste and land in Haryana, India. She is also working on a collaborative project that examines foreclosures and gentrification in New York City.
SANAL MOHAN
Sanal Mohan is Director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research located in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He is a recipient of several international and national fellowships. He combines history and ethnography in his research. His research interests include colonial modernity, social movements and questions of identity, Dalit movements and Christianity in Kerala. His book: Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against caste inequality in Kerala, published by Oxford University Press in 2015, critically examines debates on colonial modernity by bringing to the fore the Dalit experience in Kerala.
For more details:
http://kchr.ac.in/pages/135/Staff-Profile-P-Sanal-Mohan.html
SANGEETA KAMAT
Sangeeta Kamat is Professor at the Centre for International Education at the University of Amherst, Massachusetts. Her scholarly and practical work has been inspired by the extraordinary work of numerous community based organizations in India, and other parts of the Third World. Their tireless efforts to articulate an alternative discourse of development have informed her research questions and methods. During her undergraduate and graduate years in India, she worked with an array of community based organizations that worked both in the urban slums of Bombay and in the neighboring rural districts of the region. She has been involved in non-formal education programs related to health and other social issues with women and youth in these communities. These experiences have had a lasting impact upon her, and have continued to shape her research work in the U.S. Her dissertation research developed out of one of the enduring debates of our times that has deep implications for the future of community based organizations - what is the role of civil society organizations in constituting development programs and policies; what should be their role; in what ways does this transform the state as we know it; how does a rapidly developing "third sector" re-envision democratic societies? These questions have direct implications for policy making in the field of international development. In her more recent work, she has broadened the focus of these questions to study policy reforms in international education and their implications for the changing relations between state and civil society. Her interest is to analyze the construction of new discourses through these reforms - discourses that pertain to citizenship, nationalism, and other global and local identities.
SAVITA SURESH
Savitha Suresh is currently an advanced doctoral student at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore. Her doctoral research project seeks to understand the connections between state policies for welfare in higher education, and the everyday life-worlds of students accessing these policies. Specifically, her work involves an ethnographic inquiry into the lives of women students inhabiting social welfare hostels, managed by the department of social welfare, Government of Karnataka. Her research interests stem from earlier experiences of teaching sociology at St. Joseph’s Evening College, an institution catering primarily to first-generation college entrants. Interested in the ways in which social policy impacts the lives of women students, her doctoral work brings to sharp focus the intersecting workings of caste, gender and class within educational trajectories. Her areas of research interest include gender studies, everyday workings of caste, social science pedagogy and social justice in education. Previously, she has worked with Azim Premji University, Bangalore and The Hindu, Mangalore.
SMRUTHI BALA KANNAN
Smruthi Bala Kannan is a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. She has an integrated MA in English Studies with a minor in Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a Young India Fellow 2014. She has worked with schools in South India in different capacities including monitoring education policy implementation, storytelling, remedial teacher support, and teacher workshops on classroom strategy. She is interested in studying the experience of being a child in post-colonial situations. Her ongoing doctoral work is an ethnographic study of 10-14-year-old children’s lived experiences of health, hygiene, and sanitation discourses that they encounter in school. She explores the material, spatial, and linguistic dimensions of these discourses with English-Tamil bilingual children in suburban localities of northern cities in Tamil Nadu, India.
SWAGATO SARKAR
Swagato Sarkar is the founding faculty member and former Associate Dean of Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. He is an interdisciplinarian, who draws from political theory, sociology and political economy. Swagato is interested in understanding the state-society relationship in India, politics of land and rural transformation, and theory of power and governance. He obtained his PhD and MPhil from the University of Oxford, UK, and MA from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.
VENKATESWARLU YERUKALA
Venkateswarlu Yerukala is pursuing his Ph.D in Economics from the University of Hyderabad. His MPhil study was entitled ‘Smallholder Farmers: Food Security in Andhra Pradesh’. For his Ph.D. he is examining aspects of social exclusion, economic and educational vulnerabilities among nomadic communities in Andhra Pradesh. He cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET) in Economics and qualified for the National Fellowship of Higher Education for ST students. He has presented papers at several national and international conferences. He completed an internship on the concerns of Sustainable Development Goals at Bergen, Norway. He belongs to poor Yerukala tribe living in the state of Andhra Pradesh. His parents have been engaged in the traditional occupation of Basket weaving and broom making with palm and wild date tree leaves. It has been a hard path for him to achieve this present status by facing both social exclusion and economic deprivation attributed to the Yerukala Community. He wants to excel in academics and use every opportunity optimally to enhance his thinking and skills on various issues and concerns. He is also active in student politics in the University and engages in several public debates, discussions and seminars.
VIDYA SUBRAMANIAN (Co-Convener)
Vidya Subramanian has completed her PhD from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies (ZHCES) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. She is a sociologist with varied research interests in the field of education. Her doctoral research work focuses on intersecting discourses of corporate philanthropy, NGOs and new forms of governance in public education. The study examined Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in India, through a case-study of the Teach for India (TFI) programme, in order to understand how global discourses of New Public Management shape prescriptions and practices of school reforms at the local level. It was based on field work in Delhi, interviews with stakeholders in TFI and in government schools, and on a unique set of data on state policies accessed through the Right to Information Act. She received the Transnational Research Group (TRG) fellowship funded by the Max Weber Foundation-German Humanities Institutes Abroad (GHIL) for her doctoral work. Parts of her research work has been published in journals such as Contemporary Education Dialogue and International Studies in Sociology of Education. At the Centre for Education, Innovation and Action Research in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, she teaches masters-level courses on educational policy, history of modern school education, and the pedagogy of social sciences. She is also a co-principal investigator of a multi-country project on teacher education policies and practices in collaboration with the University of Sussex and the University of Cape Town.
VIJITHA RAJAN
After completing her schooling in Kerala, Vijitha joined Regional Institute of Education (Mysore) in 2006 for an Undergraduate degree in Science Education. She worked as a high school science teacher in a residential school in Coorg before joining Azim Premji University (Bangalore) for her postgraduate degree in Education in 2012. Interest in teaching and research encouraged her further to pursue doctoral research. After finishing PhD course work in Institute of Social and Economic Change (Bangalore), she joined Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi for a PhD in 2015. In 2018- 19 she got the opportunity to spend one year at the University of Leeds as part of the Commonwealth scholarship funded by the Department for International Development, UK. Her current doctoral research attempts to understand migrant children's experiences of childhood and education in urban spaces. Migration narratives being largely adult centric both in academic and policy discourses, it is imperative to hear migrant children's voices and understand their experiences. The city of Bangalore, her research site, is home to migrants from across various parts of India. Experiences of migration and the city considerably varies according to one's position in the socio-cultural, economic and political fabric of the city and her focus is on families who migrate due to distress conditions. Her other research interests include sociology of education, educational exclusion, education and social justice, teacher identities and alternative schooling.