Indian Institute of Technology Madras Archives

Dr. Satya Sundar Sethy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. He has served at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) as Assistant Professor in the Staff Training and Research Institute of Distance Education (STRIDE), New Delhi. He is the recipient of the prestigious Young Philosopher Award 2017, conferred by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Ministry of Education, Government of India. He has published several papers in prestigious journals and contributed chapters to the edited books. His publications include the books Introduction to Logic and Logical Discourse (2021), Higher Education and Professional Ethics: Roles and Responsibilities of Teachers (edited, 2018), Assessment of Learner Performance (With Mishra, S., 2018), Meaning and Language (2016), Contemporary Ethical Issues in Engineering (edited, 2015), and Indian Philosophy: Orthodox Systems (2010). His current research interests are consciousness studies; Aristotelian logic; analytic philosophy; Indian philosophy; professional ethics, especially academic ethics and engineering ethics; engineering education; and assessment and evaluation in higher education.

During his Fulbright grant, Dr. Sethy is engaged with teaching, research, and public lecture activities at the host institution and several universities in Utah, USA. He is involved in Philosophy course curriculum design and teaching a few courses to Humanities students. He is delivering guest lectures on ‘Engineering Ethics’ and ‘Engineering Education’ issues to engineering and science students, special lectures on ‘Academic Ethics’, and ‘Assessment and Evaluation Practices in Higher Education’ in the teacher training program, and a few public lectures on ‘Role and Responsibilities of Higher Education Teachers in Contemporary Times’, and ‘Oriental Philosophy and Engineering in India’.

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.