Savitribai Phule Pune University Archives

Dr. Rajani Panchang is an Assistant Professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University. She was recruited under UGC’s prestigious Faculty Recharge Program. She earned her PhD from CSIR – National Institute of Oceanography, Panaji, Goa, and secured tenured appointments as Woman Scientist at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune and SERB Fast-Track Scientist at IISER Pune under various research programs of the Government of India’s Department of Science & Technology. She is a geological oceanographer specializing in marine micropaleontology. While her forte remains Recent Benthic Foraminiferal taxonomy, her research interests are reconstruction of past climates, understanding human-climate interactions, monitoring coastal ecosystems and changing ocean dynamics, particularly coastal processes and ecosystems in light of climate change. She has research grants from the Ministry of Earth Sciences to study ocean acidification in the Arabian Sea. She is an ardent teacher and a PhD supervisor passionate about society-centric ocean research.

Dr. Panchang is a recipient of the Mani Shankar Shukla Gold Medal & Research Fellowships from DAAD, CSIR, Lila Poonawalla Foundation and Hindustan Unilever. She has been felicitated by former President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam for being an outstanding LILA Fellow in the field of Oceanography.

During her fellowship, Dr. Panchang is quantifying the responses of marine bio-calcifiers, essentially coral reef foraminifera, to ocean acidification through field studies in the Florida Reef Tract and laboratory experiments. Her work will also integrate analysis of atmospheric data and bio-calcifying specimens collected since the 1980s.

Dr. Sneha Gole completed her B A in Political Science from Fergusson College, Pune, Maharashtra, and has a masters’ degree in S ocial W ork from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. She subsequently completed her doctoral work in 2018 in the discipline of Women’s Studies from the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, examining the women’s movement in the post 1990 period, mapping new spaces, strategies and issues of the movement. Her research areas are social movements, with a particular focus on women’s movements, gender and development, and gender and culture. She teaches papers on feminisms, feminist research methodology, and gender and popular culture, among others. Her other areas of engagement and research have been gender and higher education, the social history and cultural politics of K athak and the issue of declining child sex ratios. She was awarded the Awaben Wadia Archival Fellow ship by RCWS, SNDT University to work on an archive of life narratives of young feminists, 2017-18.

The present context is one of renewed backlash against feminism, both in India and the US and the increasing erosion of hard-won rights for ‘women’. Dr. Gole’s research funded by the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow ship titled ‘Understanding feminist subjectivities in the times of intersectionality: Linking Narratives, Memory and Politics’ is an attempt to understand the predicament of the feminist project in the current moment and imagine possible productive futures for it, by bringing insights from memory studies to life narrative analysis and mapping the particular trajectory of the concept of intersectionality in the context of India.