Host City India: Berkeley

Md Haseen Akhtar

Md. Haseen Akhtar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship. His doctoral thesis focuses on design, development, and deployment of a cost-effective mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) for low-resource settings. His research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals, and he has presented at several national and international conferences. He is interested in sustainable and responsible design.

Mr. Akhtar holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, and a master’s degree in design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. He was the Gold Medalist of B.Arch. (2015-2020), was awarded the outstanding student award and was the recipient of four consecutive academic excellence scholarships (2016-2019) from the alumni association, RECAL of NIT Trichy. He is a registered architect with the Council of Architecture. He has an interest in design for society and enjoys traveling in the mountains and meeting people from various cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Akhtar is exploring design and development of collapsible sub-systems of mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) for low-resource settings. His focus is to design sub-systems that take up the least amount of space and are easily portable by increasing their collapsibility.

Kashish Dua

Ms. Kashish Dua is a doctoral candidate in English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. Her Ph.D. examines the intersections of queerness, personal narratives, and citizenship in the context of post-Independence India. This project aims to expand the current theorizations on citizenship in India by interrogating the forms citizenship takes in the case of queer individuals. It particularly focuses on the construction of the subject and the process of subjectivation in personal narratives in print by queer individuals of Indian origin. She has an M.Phil. with distinction in English from Jamia Millia Islamia and a master’s and bachelor’s in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests are queer studies, gender and South Asian literature, and partition literature.

Ms. Dua has conducted several workshops and delivered talks on queer theory and queer literature, including a panel discussion at the first Awadh Queer Literature Festival, Lucknow in 2019. Some of her publications include an edited critical edition of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It published by Prentice Hall India in 2019; a co-authored encyclopedia entry on “LGBTQ and Hinduism” for Oxford Bibliographies, published online by the Oxford University Press in 2022; a chapter titled “Rainbow Waters: Towards a Queer Coalition between India and Botswana” in a Routledge India book Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (2023) edited by Dilip Menon and Nishat Zaidi; and an article on “Ismat Chughtai’s Obscenity Trial” forthcoming in The LGBTQ+ History Book by DK London. Ms. Dua was a member of the organizing committee of an international conference titled “Language Ideologies and the ‘Vernacular’ in South Asian Colonial and Post-colonial Literature(s) and Public Spheres” in 2021 that was organized through the collaborative efforts of the University of Heidelberg, Germany and the SPARC project on “Debating and Calibrating the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Literature and Culture” by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Dua is striving to decolonize the genre of queer memoirs through a comparative study of queer personal writings in India and the “coming out” narratives of the Global North.

Vaivab Das

Vaivab Das is a UGC Senior Research Fellow in sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi. They have interdisciplinary training in Human Rights Law (NLSIU, Bangalore), Women and Gender Studies (TISS, Hyderabad), and English Literature (Ravenshaw University). They are interested in looking at the role of data cultures, law, gender and sexuality in the making of histories and policies for LGBTQIA+ persons in India.

They are an activist academician, who firmly believes that their academic goals are interwoven with fostering social change. They have worked towards the recognition of diverse gender and sexual minorities as protected categories, building gender-affirming infrastructures, and creating community spaces for LGBTQIA+ sensitization and awareness in various institutions. Recently, they worked on a writ petition for the horizontal reservation for transgender persons in public education and employment opportunities submitted to the Telangana High Court. In the past, Vaivab has worked as a technical expert on projects on gender-based violence, inclusive and accessible quality education, state welfare programs and livelihood schemes for the World Bank, Oxford Policy Management, Stanford University, and the Government of Odisha.

Vaivab’s Ph.D. project is an anthropological exploration of the bureaucratic, institutional, and socio-cultural barriers that impact the participation of transgender persons in democratic processes like elections in India. The project examines the conflict between law (legal rationality) and identity in the experiences of citizenship, along with the historical trajectories and political technologies that underpin the politics of the body and the body of politics in plural democracies.

During Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Vaivab is focusing on drawing a comparative understanding of how transgender persons navigate citizenship and elections as voters, candidates, and political representatives in the USA and in India.

Sinchan Chatterjee

Sinchan Chatterjee is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s in English from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and Jadavpur University respectively. As a Junior Research Fellow in the discipline of English, Sinchan analyzes narratives of neurodivergence with a special focus on autistic autobiographies.

Sinchan’s research has been published in journals like Didaskalia (funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland), SETU Pittsburgh, and the Mizoram University Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, and as book chapters by Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming) and SUNY Press. Additionally, he has also presented his work at many international and national conferences in CUNY, Indiana University, Bloomington, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, Rajasthan University, and Siliguri College. Sinchan’s creative works have been awarded, funded and published by the University of Toronto Press, WordIt Art Fund, Penguin Random House India, the University of Exeter Press, the International Poetry Digest, Avenel Press, and Writers Workshop.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of California, Berkley, CA, Sinchan is formulating a comparative framework for studying the modalities of representing autism in the Global North in contrast to those in the Global South, examining the underlying socio-political and cultural discourses which influence such representations. Employing theoretical frameworks from the interdisciplinary fields of autobiography studies, critical disability studies, phenomenology, crip theory, queer theory, and posthumanism, he seeks to explore how autistic narratives can destabilize ableist myths and dehumanizing stereotypes about autistic individuals. As a poet, rapper, drummer, photographer, and (part-time) stand-up comedian, Sinchan believes in preserving as many stories in as many ways as possible.