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Sumeet Mhaskar

Prof. Sumeet Mhaskar is a Professor of Sociology at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O. P. Jindal Global University. He earned his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and holds MA and MPhil degrees in political science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is a recipient of the prestigious research fellowship awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His distinguished career includes fellowships at renowned institutions such as Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Stanford University, Göttingen University and Kassel University.

Prof. Mhaskar’s research comprehensively explores the multifaceted vulnerabilities workers face at the lower end of India’s burgeoning economy. His scholarly contributions have been featured in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, magazines, policy reports, and working papers. Additionally, he shares his insights through opinion pieces, newspapers and online portals such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and The Hindu.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Mhaskar is planning to investigate technological innovations in the production process and their impact on occupational choices in the modern textile industry in Mumbai from the 1870s to 2009. This historical-sociological inquiry will examine how social structures, including gender, caste, and religion, interact with these processes. He employs a comprehensive multi-method approach that includes statistical analysis, archival research, and qualitative methods. Prof. Mhaskar will also explore similar processes in textile mills located in the USA.

Swati Mehta Dhawan

Dr. Swati Mehta Dhawan is a development sector researcher and consultant with 15 years of progressive experience advising financial service providers, international development organizations, and governments on inclusive finance. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics in 2007 from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, and completed her post-graduate diploma in forest management with a major in development management from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal. In January 2023, she earned a PhD in economic geography from the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.

Dr. Dhawan’s research interests are primarily in the fields of digital financial inclusion, women’s economic empowerment, financial capability, and consumer protection in the context of global phenomena such as migration, climate change, and digitalization. Her work spans developing market economies in Asia and Africa. Her doctoral research focused on understanding the financial lives of refugees and asylum seekers. She has published several research articles in reputed international journals. She received the Microfinance Research Award 2018 at the European Microfinance Network for her research in Germany.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Dhawan is working closely with the leading researchers in this field, Prof. Katrina Burgess, a Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Henry J. Leir Institute of Human Security, and Prof. Kim Wilson, senior lecturer in Human Security at The Fletcher School. Dr. Dhawan is exploring how newly arrived immigrants in the US use informal, formal, and digitized financial systems to optimize their incomes, build assets, and improve their financial health.

Jaya Mathur

Ms. Jaya Mathur is a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds an MA in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA in philosophy from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include ethnographic and historical studies of evidentiality and truth-making practices in medicine, cultures of expertise, practices of the body and quantification, patient-centeredness, global pharmaceutical trajectories, medical technologies, and contested disease categories.

She has worked as a researcher with public health and health policy projects examining urban women’s experiences with assisted reproduction, social inequality and access to medicinal substances among Adivasi communities in central India, and the role of unqualified medical practitioners in rural healthcare. As an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Jaya studied how technologies and practices of digital health re-configured forms of medical and psychological expertise.

For her PhD, Jaya explores how non-cancer chronic pain is constituted as a diagnostic and therapeutic category in biomedicine amidst conditions of epistemic and ontological uncertainty. To this end, she documents the translational, ethical and relational thinking as well as labor undertaken by medical experts in collaboration with their patients.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship, Jaya is affiliated to the Department of Sociology at Boston University, working with Prof. Jane Pryma. She is expanding her research on the varying strains of expertise mobilized around chronic pain, and the medicalization of pain in India and the U.S.

Mohammed Roshan Cheerakolil Konath

Dr. Mohammed Roshan C.K. completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai in 2021. He completed his master’s and bachelor’s in sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and the University of Calicut, Malappuram, Kerala respectively. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he explored the techniques of cultivating affective bonding with the Prophet Muhammed and the devotional world these bonds create among the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, South India.

Dr. Roshan has published in renowned academic and non-academic journals. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences. His area of interest revolves around the sociology of religion, technology, globalization and local cultures, affect studies, intellectual history of Islam, anthropology of Islam, and Islam and Muslims in South Asia.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Roshan is looking at a recent phenomenon among Mappila Muslims of South India whereby they look toward North American Muslim scholars to form an opinion on Islamic matters and shape their everyday life. The foundational assumption in this study is that this new tendency needs to be located in the ongoing surge of neo-traditional Islam in different parts of the world. The study compares neo-traditional Islam’s characters, structures, mode of knowledge production, global networking, and authorities in North America and South India, and analyzes the shared characteristics and ruptures between traditional Islam in both contexts. Dr. Roshan’s study enquires how these complex trans-local realities, mediated through the means and structure of globalization, call to reimagine the conventional boundaries between Islam and the West.

Devika Singh Shekhawat

Ms. Devika Singh Shekhawat is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has a master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lies at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues.

Ms. Shekhawat is a writer, educator and research scholar. She has written on the history and memory of migration of tea plantation workers of Assam for Zubaan Publication and co-authored a book chapter with the Programme of Social Actions – The Research Collective on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation and labor relations in northeast India. Her research on the work of ASHA workers in tea plantations during the pandemic has been published as a book chapter with Northeast Social Research Centre and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

Her Ph.D. research project explores the relationship between health and labor that manifests itself in the body of the worker and their everyday life. She engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker and the conditions for ailments and disease created for the worker in the tea plantations of Assam. Through a study of labor relations and structural conditions of work, her research attempts to explore how health and labor operate in tea plantations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Shekhawat is working with Dr. Sarah Besky at the South Asia Program at Cornell University to carry forward her Ph.D. research work. She is focusing on how conditions of structural reproduction of ill-health are produced and understood within the plantation economy.

Sarbeswar Sahoo

Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo is working as an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erfurt (Germany) and Charles Wallace Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and has held Visiting Fellowships at University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Cardiff (UK), University of Muenster (Germany), University of Erfurt (Germany), Roskilde University (Denmark), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), and NUS (Singapore). His research interests include Neoliberalism, Sociology of Development, and Sociology of Religion. He is the author of Civil Society and Democratization in India (Routledge, 2013) and Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Sahoo aims to compare the experiences of Bhil Pentecostals in India and Black Pentecostals in the US and discuss how different cultural contexts influence peoples’ lived religious experiences and how Pentecostalism is transforming the everyday socio-political lifeworld of people at the margins. A comparison of the Bhils with the experiences of Black Pentecostals in the US will help us understand not just the “contextual” nature of religious experiences and activities, but also the relationships between religion, state and secularism.

Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal

Ms. Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. Her doctoral research focuses on urban spaces, migrant communities, and land transformation in Bengaluru. She is researching urban local markets to understand how ethno-religious migrant communities co-produce spaces significant for local businesses in the city and negotiate with the dynamics of land transformation politics. Ms. Fasal has presented her research at various international conferences, including a presentation on urban aestheticization politics and land claims of a fishing community in Chennai at the European Sociological Association’s Urban Sociology Conference in Berlin and another on “Southern Urbanism as a Non-western Methodology for Urban Research” at the Ireland-India Institute’s South Asia conference.

Ms. Fasal has an interdisciplinary background with an M.A. in women’s studies and B.A. in social sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Hyderabad respectively. This interdisciplinary training reflects the choice and methodology of her ongoing research, which combines concepts from multiple disciplines such as sociology, urban studies, human geography and social history. Ms. Fasal has obtained Junior Research Fellowship (2018) in women’s studies and cleared UGC NET (2022) in sociology. She also worked as a research assistant on a UNICEF project at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Besides academics, Ms. Fasal enjoys cooking, cinema and traveling.

During her Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Fasal is striving to valorize the heterogeneity of experiences and knowledge about Global South cities and is conducting comparative research on migrant economies and urbanisms.

Deblina Dey

Dr. Deblina Dey is an associate professor of sociology and the assistant director of the Centre for Law and Humanities at the Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. She was a Hunt Postdoctoral fellow with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, based in New York. The University Grants Commission, Government of India, awarded her the Junior and Senior Research fellowships for doctoral research in sociology at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Dr. Dey writes on contemporary socio-legal issues and has published in edited volumes and reputed international journals on topics such as dispute resolution forums for older people, custodial neglect of older political prisoners, and religious norms related to end-of-life care. In 2022, she was awarded the Prof. Nirendra Chandra Choudhury Young Scholar award in social anthropology and sociology for her research contribution by the Indian Anthropological Society. She has been an alumna of academies and workshops organized by the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard University, and is a team member for events at the Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet), a global platform to generate critical discourse on law in South Asia.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow at DePaul University, Chicago, IL, Dr. Dey is studying different eldercare models in urban India, focusing on the interventions made by law, market and philanthropic institutions. Her ethnographic research highlights the experiences of marginalization in late life and suggests ways to evolve better mechanisms to address abandonment, elder abuse and neglect.

Sayari Misra

Sayari Misra is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), IIT Jammu. She completed her graduation in microbiology from Scottish Church College, Kolkata. After that, she did her post-graduation in social work (MSW) from the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Durgapur and was awarded the institute gold medal for her academic performance. She has worked with Dr. S. Y. Quraishi (former Chief Election Commissioner of India) on his book on family planning titled The Population Myth as his research associate. Her research interests include themes of social stratification and inequality, social networks, and access to water and sanitation. Her ongoing doctoral study primarily focuses on mapping the accessibility to water resources and the social network structure of the rural communities of the Indian Sundarbans.

During extensive field visits in various remote locations in West Bengal, Sayari was drawn to the complex problem of climate-induced water-resource stress and associated vulnerabilities in resource-dependent communities like the Sundarbans. One key insight gained from her research is the pivotal role of social networks in influencing the accessibility of resources and mitigating vulnerabilities, especially among marginalized groups. However, the mechanism and importance of these social relationships in the context of water resource stress remain elusive.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, Sayari is aiming to bridge the aforementioned knowledge gap by elucidating the nuanced interplay between social networks and water resource stress, particularly within marginalized communities.