Inequality, Mobility, and Sociality in Contemporary India
Shilpa Phadke
Shilpa Phadke is a sociologist. She is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has been educated at St. Xavier’s College, SNDT University, TISS in Mumbai and the University of Cambridge, UK. She is co-author of Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (Penguin 2011). Her doctoral research focused on questions of heterosexuality in the new spaces of consumption in Mumbai. She has published both in academic journals and anthologies and in the popular media. Her areas of concern include gender and the politics of space, the middle classes, sexuality and the body, feminist politics among young women, reproductive subjectivities, feminist parenting, and pedagogic practices.
Priya Deshingkar
Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium (RPC) at the University of Sussex. She has a PhD in Development Studies and is primarily interested in policy research on internal migration, particularly rural-urban migration, and the role of urbanisation in poverty reduction. Prior to joining the University of Sussex, Dr Deshingkar was a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London where she led research on migration and poverty. As Research Director of Migrating out of Poverty, Priya has played a critical role in shaping the research strategy of the six year DFID funded RPC, where rural-urban migration and urbanisation are core themes. She is presently overseeing the implementation of surveys and qualitative research in five global regions - Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa. She has recently completed a DfID funded study on adaptive social protection and migration in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, which examines the links between cash transfers, adaptation and migration. She is currently developing a conceptual framework for a programme of research on migration and family farming being implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Ramphal Institute in Samoa, Jamaica, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Mozambique. Dr. Deshingkar has published widely on migration and development for international journals and think tanks.
Stefan Fiol
Stefan Fiol is an Assistant Professor in the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently completing a monograph that explores the commercialization of lok sanskriti (‘folk culture’) and lok sangeet (‘folk music’) in the Uttarakhand Himalayas of North India. Dr. Fiol’s research has been funded by fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, and University of Cincinnati Research Council, and has been published in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Asian Music, Journal of Asian Studies, and South Asian Popular Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has previously taught at the University of Illinois (2001-2003), the University of Notre Dame (2005-2006), and the Eastman School of Music (2008-2010).
Satendra Kumar
Satendra Kumar teaches in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He is a specialist in the anthropology of South Asia. His research examines the relationships between caste, class and democracy in India. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in western UP, focusing on family, kinship, democracy and the local state. He has also written about youth politics in a provincial UP town. In 2012 he has started a new research project on the expansion of private education and emerging inequalities in north India. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the LSE.
Kalpana Kannabiran
Kalpana Kannabiran, a sociologist and legal researcher, is currently Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, an autonomous research institute supported by the Indian Council for Social Science Research. She was awarded the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research in the field of Social Aspects of Law by the ICSSR in 2003. She was part of the founding faculty of NALSAR University of Law where she taught sociology and law for a decade, 1999-2009, and is a founder member of Asmita Resource Centre for Women set up in 1991. Her work has focused on understanding the social foundations of non-discrimination, violence against women, questions of constitutionalism and social justice in India. Her most recent book is Tools of Justice: Non Discrimination and the Indian Constitution, Routledge, New Delhi, 2012. She was a Member of the Expert Group on the Equal Opportunity Commission, Government of India, 2007-2008 and the General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies, 1998-2000.
Pamela Philipose
Pamela Philipose, who began her career with The Times of India, is presently director and editor-in-chief of Women’s Feature Service (WFS), an agency mandated to highlight gender issues in media coverage. Earlier, she was senior associate editor with The Indian Express, anchoring the edit page and writing commentary on a range of issues, including those of conflict, politics, development and the media. She was awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist in 1999 and the Zee-Astitva Award for Constructive Journalism in 2007. She has just co-edited a volume on reportage on conflict entitled Across the Crossfire: Women and Conflict In India (Women Unlimited, 2012). She has also contributed to various anthologies – including Memoirs From The Women’s Movement In India: Making A Difference (Women Unlimited/Kali For Women, 2011) as well as Making News, Breaking News, Her Own Way (edited by Latika Padgaonkar and Shubha Singh (Tranquebar, 2012) and Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications (edited by Nalini Rajan, Sage Publications, 2005).
Sarah Hodges
Sarah Hodges is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920-1940 (2008) and editor of ReproductiveHealth in India: History, Politics, Controversies (2006). A new book, Biotrash: Money, Medicine and Garbage in India, will be published by Navayana in 2014.
Laura Dudley Jenkins
Laura Dudley Jenkins is an Associate Professor of Political Science and affiliated with Asian Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on social justice policies in the context of culturally diverse democracies, especially India. Jenkins’ book on affirmative action (Identity and identification in India ) examines the politics of caste, class, religion, and gender. In her articles, she analyzes religious freedom and conversion, competing minorities’ claims for affirmative action, colonial and contemporary government anthropology, the role of social science in anti-discrimination law, and reserved legislative seats for women. Her book chapters include her research on religious family law systems, mass religious conversion as a route to social mobility, and comparative affirmative action.
As a Fulbright New Century Scholar, she researched access and equity in higher education in India and South Africa. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Hays program, the Dartmouth Humanities Center, and the United States Institute of Peace. See LauraDudleyJenkins.com for additional research interests and publications.
Ashwini Deshpande
Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Her Ph.D. and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues, with a focus on caste and gender in India, as well as on aspects of the Chinese economy: poverty, inequality, regional disparities and gender discrimination. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of Grammar of Caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India, OUP, 2011 and Affirmative Action in India, OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, forthcoming 2013. She is the editor of Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (along with William Darity, Jr.), Routledge, London, 2003; Globalization and Development: A Handbook of New Perspectives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007 (hardcover) and 2010 (paperback); Capital Without Borders: Challenges to Development, Anthem Press, UK, 2010 (hardcover) and 2012 (paperback) and Global Economic Crisis and the Developing World (with Keith Nurse), Routledge, London, 2012. She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IEDRA Award) in 1994, and the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45.
Ben Rogaly
Ben Rogaly is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He researched seasonal and other temporary migration for work in India over two decades and has published widely. His most recent work has focused on im/mobility, identity and class relations in provincial English cities.
ALPA SHAH
Alpa Shah is Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of “In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in India” (Duke University Press and Oxford University Press, 2010). Her co-edited volumes include: with Stuart Corbridge, “The Underbelly of the Indian Boom,” Economy and Society, 42:3 2013; with Crispin Bates, “Savage Attack: Adivasi Insurgency in India” (Social Science Press, 2013 forthcoming); with Sara Shneiderman, “Towards and Anthropology of Affirmative Action: the practices, policies and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia,” Focaal, 65:3 2013, with Jens Lerche and Barbara Harriss-White, “Agrarian Transitions and Left Politics in India,” Journal of Agrarian Change, 13, 2013; and with Judith Pettigrew, “Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal” (Social Science Press, 2012).
Sanjay Ruparelia
Sanjay Ruparelia is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research and, in 2012-2013, Visiting Fellow in Democracy and Development at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. His main publications include Divided We Govern: The Paradoxes of Power in Contemporary Indian Democracy (Hurst and Oxford University Press: forthcoming) and (co-edited with Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss and Stuart Corbridge) Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? (London: Routledge, 2011), as well as articles on India’s democratic exceptionalism, the dangers of militant Hindu nationalism, and the new pattern of growing economic inequalities in India and China. Dr. Ruparelia’s longstanding interests concern the politics of the broader Indian left, prospects of power-sharing in federal parliamentary democracies, and the role of institutions, strategy and judgment in politics more broadly. His new research examines the move to enact a right to basic socioeconomic entitlements in contemporary Indian democracy. It is part of a longer-term collaborative research initiative that seeks to map, explain, and assess the evolving great transformations of India and China.