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Alexa Russo

Ms. Alexa Russo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her PhD project analyzes the growing farmer producer organization/cooperative and sustainable agriculture movements in India, focusing on the role of gender in the imagining and formations of rural economic futures. Ms. Russo began her studies at Amherst College where she received a BA in Economics and Religion (with honors) in 2012. While studying abroad in Bodh Gaya and Banaras, Ms. Russo completed an ethnographic project of worshippers of Hanuman and Sri Lankan pilgrims, and after graduation, co-authored “A Dream Experiment in Development Economics” in the Journal of Economic Education.

Ms. Russo subsequently received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, in which she conducted ethnographic research of women’s self-help groups in a remote Rajasthani village. In preparation for the fellowship, Ms. Russo began Hindi language learning, and has continued for many years after, reaching a distinguished level of proficiency. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Russo worked for three years at J.P. Morgan where she acquired further insights into financial frameworks through analyses of socially motivated institutions as well as financial and non-financial companies. Ms. Russo then received an MSc in Gender (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017 and received the Best Performance Prize in her degree. In her master’s thesis, Ms. Russo analyzed how representations of women within a rural Gujarati embroidery cooperative are negotiated across globally circulating discourses on entrepreneurship and third-world “authenticity.” She later published her thesis in The Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development. After this program, Ms. Russo expanded her on-the-ground understanding of gender within NGO networks through her work in women’s rights advocacy at Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership. While on Stanford campus, Ms. Russo has been a committed student worker organizer, leading graduate student advocacy on affordable housing, childcare, and other critical services, as well as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this work, Ms. Russo received the Stanford University’s 2020 Community Impact Award. She is an avid meditator and recreational yogi, and enjoys her new found hobby as a novice photographer.

Rural India currently faces intersecting economic and ecological crises that have also exacerbated social inequalities. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Russo aims to analyze how various actors address India’s agrarian challenges through forms of sustainable agriculture, with the cooperative as a key structure of implementation, and women as pivotal agents of change. Ms. Russo aims to investigate how different actors envision sustainable agrarian futures in India as well as the practices and ideals of labor, gender, and sociality that constitute a sustainable cooperative. Her project also analyzes how political alignments, relationships, and positionality within policy networks shape and enable various agrarian imaginings.

David Monteserin Narayana

David Narayana is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University, working on South Asian religions and specializing in the history and practice of Śaivism. Born and raised in Spain, David began his undergraduate study of philosophy at the University of Oviedo (Spain, 2013) and he later received his BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2017), completing two minors in both religious and South Asian studies. He then earned an MA in religion, with a concentration in Asian religions, from Yale Divinity School (2020).

David is a certified yoga instructor with teaching experience in Spain, India, and the U.S. He has also worked as a Spanish language teacher, interpreter, and translator. His interests lie in the fields of Indian and comparative philosophy, Sanskrit and Tamil literature, and yogic and tantric traditions (Hindu and Buddhist).

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is telling the story of how a famous Hindu deity came to be worshiped in the form of empty space in a medieval South Indian temple. While the temple town of Chidambaram has been receiving considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, much of it has centered around the figure of Naṭarāja, the dancing Śiva. However, very little has been said about how Śiva came to be revered as space. David’s research is attempting to fill this gap by unearthing forgotten and unstudied texts in Sanskrit and Tamil that may provide a history for this belief and practice.