Host City India: Burlington

Devika Singh Shekhawat

Ms. Devika Singh Shekhawat is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has a master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lies at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues.

Ms. Shekhawat is a writer, educator and research scholar. She has written on the history and memory of migration of tea plantation workers of Assam for Zubaan Publication and co-authored a book chapter with the Programme of Social Actions – The Research Collective on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation and labor relations in northeast India. Her research on the work of ASHA workers in tea plantations during the pandemic has been published as a book chapter with Northeast Social Research Centre and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

Her Ph.D. research project explores the relationship between health and labor that manifests itself in the body of the worker and their everyday life. She engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker and the conditions for ailments and disease created for the worker in the tea plantations of Assam. Through a study of labor relations and structural conditions of work, her research attempts to explore how health and labor operate in tea plantations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Shekhawat is working with Dr. Sarah Besky at the South Asia Program at Cornell University to carry forward her Ph.D. research work. She is focusing on how conditions of structural reproduction of ill-health are produced and understood within the plantation economy.

Senganglu Thaimei

Prof. Senganglu Thaimei is an Associate Professor of English at Miranda House, University of Delhi, New Delhi. She is currently a fellow at The Highland Institute in Kohima, Nagaland. She received her PhD from the English Department, University of Delhi. Her specialization is folklore studies. Dr. Thaimei has worked on many projects at the Centre for Archiving and Academic Translation, University of Delhi, that involved archiving of tribal oral materials from Northeast India. Her published works appear in folklore journals such as Folklore and Folkloristics. Dr. Thaimei is also a visual artist and a published illustrator. Her illustrations are featured in Easterine Kire’s novels, Songry (2021), Journey of the Stone (2021), published by Barkweaver. She is a member of the Art for Change Foundation, an arts organization based in New Delhi. She has recently ventured into a pluralist approach involving research along with artistic illustration – an attempt to present a confluence of scientific survey, folk knowledge, visual art, and literature .

Shiju Sam Varughese

Dr. Shiju Sam Varughese is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSSTIP) in the School of Social Sciences of Central University of Gujarat (CUG), Gandhinagar. After receiving basic training in biology, he completed his M.Phil research on People’s Science Movements (PSMs) and doctoral research on public controversies over science in media from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Dr. Varughese works on issues related to science and democracy by employing concepts and tools from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science. He has authored Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-edited Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (Orient Blackswan, 2015). His current research interests include public engagement with science and technology, risk governance, new social movements, social history of knowledge, science and technology in popular culture, and regional modernities.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Varughese will theorise how the post-disaster societies develop new practices of care to reconstruct their life in the context of the pesticide disaster caused by the aerial spraying of Endosulfan in the cashew plantations in Kasaragod district of Kerala. He will argue that the practices of the community in the post-disaster reconstructive phase will be helpful in developing a new participatory model of risk governance to survive recurrent disasters.

Sarita Sundar

Ms. Sarita Sundar’s practice and research spans heritage studies, visual culture, and design theory. She is the founder of Hanno, a heritage interpretation and design consultancy.

Ms. Sundar has a postgraduate degree in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK where she was awarded the 2016 Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize. She is a visiting faculty at various design institutes: including NID, Ahmedabad; and Srishti Manipal School of Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her research ranges from studies of vernacular typography to looking at the intangible and material culture of performance practices in the temples of Valuvanad, Kerala (for which she received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts). Her present research focuses on the cultural and design history of seats in India and will culminate in a publication in 2022.

Ms. Sundar’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship takes forward her multi-disciplinary research and seeks to address the lacuna of critical discourse in the discipline of design in India. By mapping the transcultural exchange of aesthetics and ideologies between India and the United States, and situating the interconnected events and dialogues, Ms. Sundar’s project looks at how these historical milestones continue to motivate and influence contemporary design, and associated fields such as curatorial practice in both countries. Furthermore, it examines the pathways followed by modernism and counter-movements like postmodernism, and their interactions with indigenous epistemology in Indian aesthetics and thought. She is also co-teaching a course, ‘Visualizing India’, at the University of Vermont.