Home Institution India: Independent Scholar

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.

Krupa Rajangam

Dr. Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based heritage scholar and conservation practitioner. In her research, she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practices, particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. Her work is community-engaged, with a focus on public dissemination of research.

Dr. Rajangam earned her bachelor’s in architecture in 1999 from the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru and her master’s in conservation studies in 2005 from the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York, UK. In 2020, she completed her doctorate in conservation studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

Dr. Rajangam is the Founder-Director of a collective called “Saythu… Linking People and Heritage” and an editorial board member of the Taylor & Francis journal, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites (CMAS). She runs an immersive field school that is driven by and teaches critical theory, experiential field-based education, and interdisciplinary methods of learning.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Rajangam is working to contribute to global debates on archaeological and heritage place-making, social geography, and social violence as outcomes of UNESCO World Heritage inscription, boundary demarcation, and management. The need for such studies is pressing urban-centric development of historic landscapes, contrary to the intent of practice and policy, is deepening social marginalization.

Sujoy Ghosh

Dr. Sujoy Kumar Ghosh is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Laboratorio NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR, Pisa, Italy. Previously, he was Post doctoral Research Associate at UNIST, South Korea. Dr. Ghosh completed his Ph.D. in 2019, M.Sc. in 2012, and B.Sc. in 2010 from the Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Dr. Ghosh has published 45 scientific articles in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters, and he possesses h-index of 29 (Google scholar). He has won several awards and recognitions, such as Young Scientist Award in “International Virtual Conference on Advances in Functional Materials (AFM 2020)”, Newton Bhabha Fellow (2017), Best Poster Award in “Fourth International Symposium on Semiconductor Materials and Devices (ISSMD-4)” (2017), DST Award for 66th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Germany (2016) among others. The design and experimental study on piezo-, pyro- and ferro-electric properties of synthetic and natural polymers as well as investigation of their resulting energy harvesting device towards the applications of self-powered healthcare monitoring are leitmotifs of his research.

In recent years, the integration between medicine and technology qualitatively extended new designs of implantable biomedical devices (IBDs), allowing competitive advantage for medical treatment of human body. However, nearly all classes of active IBDs rely on battery powers, which not only have limited lifespan, but also increase patient’s health risks and expanses. During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Ghosh is designing ultrasonic waves stimulated piezo-electrically-powered miniature wireless IBDs using biodegradable natural polymer materials in a non-invasive approach.

Harshita Srivastava

Ms. Harshita Srivastava is an independent scholar from Kolkata. She completed her master’s in English in 2021 from St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata and received the Britto Gold Medal for securing the first rank at the university. She has also received a Junior Research Fellowship. In her undergraduate years at Loreto College, she received the Madhumita Mitra Memorial Award for responsibility and sincerity; Nirmal Sharma Memorial Award for securing the highest marks in Hindi; Bibhas Roy Award for overall excellence; and certificates for proficiency in political science, French and Hindi. She has served as the Secretary of the Literary Society both at her undergraduate and graduate institutions; and has been on the editorial board of the college/university magazines.

Ms. Srivastava has authored a volume of poems titled ‘Corona Diary, Before and Beyond’ published by Writers Workshop. She has translated a volume of Hindi poems to English titled ‘Wheel of Creation’ authored by Dr. Rakhi Roy Halder. Her research interests mainly include the Divine Feminine in Hinduism and partition literature. She has presented and published research papers on these topics.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Srivastava is teaching Hindi at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She aims to make the experience of her students as meaningful as possible by highlighting the cultural nuances as an integral element of the language learning process. In addition, she hopes to imbibe the teaching pedagogy of the U.S. so that new ideas may be formed and used in her teaching career.

Akhila Vimal Chenicheri

Dr. Akhila Vimal Chenicheri is a trained dancer, and a Performance and Disability Studies scholar. She completed her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis was titled ‘Performing Disfiguration: Pain, Affect and Staging of Relationalities in Classical and Ritual-Healing Performances of Kerala’. She obtained her master’s and M Phil degrees from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, and has a B A (English) from Maharajas College, Ernakulam, Kerala .

As a trained dancer who identifies as disabled, owing to partial and recurrent vision loss, Dr. Chenicheri’s research is located at the intersection of performance and disability and disabled dance pedagogy. Methodologically, she is committed to ‘Practice as Research’ and her research interests include disfiguration, relationality of disability, gender, and caste in the Indian textual and performance practices and ritual performances. This research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. In 2021, she received the inaugural International Federation of Theatre Research New Scholars Award in Disability Performance. Akhila has been a fellow at the prestigious Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation at Harvard University in 2016.

Her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research project is to develop a practice- led dance pedagogy for blind and low- vision performers. The pedagogy aims to collectively initiate collaborative learning through somatic engagement with blind and low- vision performers, including the cultural unlearning of the expectations that come with dance training and sensibility.

Utkarsh Kumar

Prof. Utkarsh Kumar has taught as a guest Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi. Prof. Kumar received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Delhi in 2019. He was the recipient of the ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Kumar obtained his Masters in Social Work from the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. Previously, during his professional stint in the development sector with PRADAN, Prof. Kumar designed and implemented various livelihood prototypes at the grassroots. His research interests span Anthropology of Care and Caring profession, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and the political economy of mineral resource extraction. Prof. Kumar has several research articles to his credit. I n 2020, Prof. Kumar authored commissioned research documents on the ongoing conflict and negotiations around mega power projects in Jharkhand. He has also offered consultancy for the ‘just transition’ in the e nergy sector to s outh Asia- based advocacy groups, viz. The Research Collective and Public Finance and Public Accountability Collective.

The Heavy Mining Equipment (HME) technology has arguably become a crucial global mediator in resource extractive industrial operations. A multi-site ethnographic field stint expedited by the Fulbright-Nehru P ostdoctoral Research grant is an attempt to understand the designing imperatives of the HME machinery produced in the global North, and to trace social relations fostered and shaped around deployment practices of these machines in the global South. The aim is to capture socio-cultural imaginations and aspirations of social actors and institutions associated with the designing, circulation, and deployment practices of HME technology.