University of Hyderabad Archives

Chinar Mehta

Ms. Chinar Mehta is a doctoral scholar and Research Assistant, working at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. She has presented at conferences and seminars held by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and Frames of Reference organized by the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS. In 2021, she was also selected to be part of the Doctoral Colloquium at the annual AoIR conference. As a Research Assistant at FemLabCo, she researches labor conditions in the sanitation sector in Hyderabad. FemLabCo is a research project funded by the International Development Research Centre which research how digital tools can be leveraged by women workers to get better bargaining power in a precarious labor market.

Ms. Mehta’s doctoral research pertains to the people, tools, and practices involved in software development, and what that means for the design new media technologies. For this, she draws from theoretical work in feminist media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. She continues this research at Carnegie Mellon University with Dr Sarah Fox, to get guidance with interdisciplinary research that aims to make meaningful and specific claims about what technologies allow and disallow.

Ms. Mehta received her masters’ degree in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Mumbai. She has received prior training in Information and Communication Technology through her bachelors’ degree from Dhirubhai Ambani Insitute of Information and Communication Technology. She worked as a software developer for 2 years before joining TISS.

Kanchan K. Malik

Dr. Kanchan K. Malik is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India, where she also served as Head from 2017-20. She has been a Faculty Fellow with UNESCO Chair on Community Media since 2011 and Editor of the e-newsletter, CR News. With a dual Master’s in Economics and Mass Communication, Dr. Malik worked as a journalist with The Economic Times, New Delhi, before kindling her career in academics. Dr. Malik’s teaching and research are in the areas of community media, women in community communications, journalism studies, and media ethics. She has worked with national and international research projects and published papers on media interventions by non-governmental organizations for empowerment at the grassroots level.

Dr. Malik co-authored with Prof. Vinod Pavarala the much-cited book ‘Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India’ (Sage: 2007). Her co-edited book is ‘Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves’ (Routledge: 2020). She recently worked on the manual ‘Strengthening Gender Sensitive Practices and Programming in Community Radio’ (UNESCO, 2021).

Dr. Malik’s Fulbright-Nehru teaching component will comprise thematic seminars focusing on how community media in South Asia have enabled women to create gender spaces, challenge women’s marginalization in access to media and help mainstream gender in social change discourses. Her research project will seek to develop a framework for interpreting the empowerment question through the culturally rooted lived realities of women engaged in community communication and untangling how women negotiate with and navigate the deep-rooted issues affecting gender equality.

Bhangya Bhukya

Dr. Bhangya Bhukya is a Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He specializes in Modern Indian History. His research interests include community histories, the effects of power and knowledge, governmentality and dominance, the state and nationalism, intellectual histories of subaltern communities, identity politics by forest and hill people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow (2003-06) and a British Council Visiting Fellow (2010).

Dr. Bhukya did his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, UK, and his thesis has been published as a book, Subjugated Nomads. The Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams in 2010. He published quite influential books, including The Roots of the Periphery. A history of the Deccan Gonds (2017), History of Modern Telangana (2017) and A Cultural History of Telangana (2021). He is also a public historian and activist involved in India’s Adivasi human rights movements.

Dr. Bhukya proposes to study why British colonial protectionism and post-colonial integrationism/assimilationism did not bring tangible changes in Adivasi life, particularly how these development approaches outweighed Adivasi self-rule and self-determinism; and, consequently, also their political rights. The study is theoretical in its nature, and it interrogates the philosophy, assumptions, and approaches of what is termed ‘Adivasi development’ and proposes to re-investigate what development has actually meant to Adivasis.

Nadimpalli Siva Kumar

Dr. Nadimpalli Siva Kumar is Senior Professor at the School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), Hyderabad, Telangana. Supported by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the German Research Foundation, Dr. Kumar developed and coordinated the first international research training group in Molecular and Cellular Glycosciences with the University of Muenster, Germany. He is also coordinating EU supported projects: “Internationalization and Virtual Exchange: Borderless Between EU and Asian Countries” and NAMASTE, and NAMASTE+ supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His areas of research include protein biochemistry, cell, and molecular biology, glycobiology, and bio-nanotechnology. He received his master’s in biochemistry from Andhra University and his Ph.D. from CFTRI, Mysuru, Karnataka.

Purendra Prasad

Dr. Purendra Prasad is a professor of sociology at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana. He has previously held positions at the Centre for Social Studies (CSS), Surat, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. Dr. Prasad was a British Council grantee for medical anthropology research at Brunel University, West London, UK (1999-2000), and he also collaborated with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), California Recovery and Reconnaissance team on the Bhuj Gujarat Earthquake in 2005. His research interests encompass critical agrarian studies, environmental studies, the political economy of health and development, and urban studies. His recent work investigates wealth accumulation and business elites in India as part of a broader research project on wealth inequalities in South Africa, Brazil, and India. Dr. Prasad has co-edited the book Equity and Access: Health Care Studies in India (Oxford University Press, 2018), and serves on the editorial advisory committee of the Sociological Bulletin. Additionally, he contributes to the academic and ethical advisory boards of various universities and institutions in India.

As Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Chair at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Dr. Prasad is teaching and conducting research on how the intersection of caste/race, gender, and growing economic disparities shaped wealthy elites in India and the U.S.