Author: Ram Kumar

Dr Bharath Sundaram Highlights Complex Challenges at Pulicat Lake at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Georg-August University, Gottingen, Germany

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight, General Topics

Dr Bharath Sundaram, Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, SIAS, Faculty Director, Krea – IFMR Research Centres Coordination Cell, and Sustainability Officer, Krea University and Sharon Buteau, Executive Director, LEAD at Krea University are leading a project to understand the interactions between environment, natural resource governance systems, market linkages, value chains, financial inclusion, climate change, and gender in Pulicat Lake. 

In this context, Dr Bharath Sundaram has been invited to present his work on Pulicat at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Georg-August University, Gottingen, Germany, on 19 June, 2024. He will talk about how complex push-pull factors reduce adaptive capacity of individuals and social groups within Pulicat, with strong variations across state borders and livelihood types. 

For more information, click here

Sayantan Datta Appointed as a Jury Member for the 2024 Rainbow Journalism Awards

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Sayantan Datta, Assistant Professor of Practice at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy (CWP), Krea University, has been appointed as a jury member for the 2024 Rainbow Journalism Awards. Sayantan will join author and filmmaker Sindhu Rajasekharan to judge entries in the op-ed category.

The Rainbow Journalism Awards intend to recognize work by journalists that tell authentic and complex stories of queer, transgender, and intersex lives in India. 

Applications for the award are open until 18 July, and the link to apply is here.  

Sayantan Datta Appolinted as a Candidate Working Editor and a Member of the Editorial Board at the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Sayantan Datta, Assistant Professor of Practice at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy (CWP), Krea University, has been appointed as a candidate working editor and a member of the editorial board at the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME). The IJME is a multidisciplinary open-access journal publishing high-quality articles in the areas of medical ethics, bioethics, and the humanities. In joining the journal’s masthead, Datta intends to participate in all aspects of the journal’s functioning and add to the journal’s historic contributions in the fields of health and healthcare in India.

Read about the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME) here

An Op-Ed by Dr Sambaiah Gundimeda Published in The Hindustan Times

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

An op-ed by Dr Sambaiah Gundimeda, Associate Professor of Politics, SIAS, Krea University, was  published in The Hindustan Times on 7 June, 2024.
Titled The Naidu vs Jagan potboiler in Andhra, the article delves into the factors behind the significant defeat of the ruling YSR Congress Party and the resounding triumph of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), comprising the Telugu Desam Party, Jana Sena Party, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

In the piece, Dr  Gundimeda argues that the YSRCP’s overwhelming focus on welfare programs, coupled with its neglect of election promises made in 2019 and a politics centred around retribution, were pivotal in its electoral downfall. The governance failures of the YSRCP have paved the way for the emergence of the TDP as a potent alternative political entity in the state.

Furthermore, the alliance between the TDP and the BJP, along with the influence of Pawan Kalyan and the pledge of ‘super six’ welfare initiatives, played significant roles in securing the landslide victory for the NDA. 

Know More

You can also access the full article here

PhD student at IFMR GSB presented a research paper

Ram Kumar Student Spotlight

Jyothis Maria Franklin, PhD student, IFMR GSB, Krea University presented a research paper at the Management Education and Research Colloquium (MERC) 2024 by the Indian Institute of Management, Kashipur on 31 and 1 June, 2024. The title of the paper is Investigating Consumer Awareness of Deceptive Advertisements Cited by Regulatory Institutions.

Abstract:
Despite numerous regulatory frameworks in the domain of advertising ethics, there is still a knowledge gap on how consumers recognise and respond to advertisements that have been subject to court orders for deception. The primary objective of the study is to find out the perceptions of consumers on the advertisements that are particularly referenced in court orders for deceiving and misleading them. It is expected that consumers who are aware of deceptive and misleading strategies are more likely to approach advertisements with caution and thus scrutinise the credibility and trust of the claims made by advertisers.

Dr Panchali Ray Co-Edits a Volume Titled ‘Teaching/Writing Resistance: Women’s Studies in Contemporary Times’, Published by Orient BlackSwan

Ram Kumar Research Spotlight

Dr Panchali Ray, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Gender Studies, SIAS and Associate Dean (Academics) at Krea University, co-edited a volume along with Professor Shadab Bano (Aligarh Muslim University), titled Teaching/Writing Resistance: Women’s Studies in Contemporary Times, which brings together a diverse set of essays around gender and women’s studies as a formal discipline and raises important questions: What are its achievements, and equally, what are its historical blind spots and faultlines? Has women’s studies emerged as a critical space within the academy—as its pioneers envisioned—or does it remain limited by institutional bias and social inequality? Drawing on the perspectives of stalwarts of women’s movements who fought to establish the discipline and younger scholars who now address critical debates in the field,

the chapters explore a variety of themes: pedagogical practices; the relation between knowledge production and university structures; the role of social, regional, religious, and caste locations in the way women’s studies is perceived and transacted; and for the first time, the crucial relation between feminist scholarship and State and institutional power, both in India and internationally. The volume is published by Orient BlackSwan. 

Find out more here. 

Rising Temperatures, Falling Turnouts: Dr Chirag Dhara’s Perspective on the Impact of Climate Change on Democratic Participation

Ram Kumar Research Spotlight

Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, SIAS, Krea University has authored an article titled India’s Voters Literally Feel the Heat, featured in the magazine Down To Earth and on the online news website The Mooknayak. The article examines India’s extreme heat during the 2024 elections, highlighting the disproportionate impact of climate change on poorer populations and raising concerns about its influence on voter turnout and overall democratic participation. 

Read the article here or here. 

Shweta Rani’s Essay Featured in the Edited Volume ‘Event and Everyday: Empiricisms and Epistemologies’ by Orient BlackSwan

Ram Kumar Research Spotlight

Shweta Rani, Faculty Teaching Associate at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy (CWP) at Krea University has contributed an essay titled Living with Mosquitoes: Exploring the Dengue Outbreak in Delhi to the edited volume Event and Everyday: Empiricisms and Epistemologies. This volume, edited by Prof Yasmeen Arif, has been published by Orient BlackSwan.

About the Volume 

The volume explores the relationship between Event the extraordinary and Everyday, the ordinary in both concept and practice. Based on Shweta Rani’s fieldwork, her essay in the volume argues that it is productive to explore an epidemic through the everyday multispecies encounters in the city rather than through an episodic imagination of the disease event.

Abstract

In 2015, Delhi witnessed what can now be called the last dengue outbreak in the city. In this article, Shweta Rani draws upon her fieldwork conducted during and since the outbreak to comment on the rubric of Event-Everyday. It investigates how people – city dwellers, medical practitioners, officials, municipal workers, dengue patients, and their caretakers – deal with the persisting presence of mosquitoes in their everyday lives. While state health strategies seek absolute human-mosquito isolation, field narratives portray a more complex picture. For instance, municipal workers assigned the task of ‘killing’ mosquitoes encounter the resilience of an insect as a lifeform. Moreover, people, even while dealing with the dengue outbreak, don’t necessarily perceive its vector as their deadly foe. Shweta Rani argues that these modalities of living with a supposedly undesirable non-human other are too intricate to be captured by the episodic imagination of an event, as the latter is understood in the common parlance. Instead, paying heed to the intertwining of ‘event’ with its apparent antonym, the ‘everyday’, is essential. Establishing everyday’s dynamism and its susceptibility to innovation is analogous to challenging the temporal fixity of an event. Hence, the burden of this work is to demonstrate the potential of everyday to enrich our understanding of an event. The essay ends with potential questions this scholarship might enable us to ask.

Citation

Rani, Shweta. 2024. “Living with Mosquitoes: Exploring the dengue outbreak in Delhi.” In Event-Everyday: Epistemologies and Empiricisms, edited by Yasmeen Arif, 248-267. Orient-Blackswan Press. ISBN no.- 978-93-5442-831-9

An Interview with Dr R S Sathya Saminadan: From a Marketing Professor to an Acclaimed Fiction Author

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

An author interview with Dr R S Sathya Saminadan, Associate Professor of Practice & Area Chair – Marketing, IFMR GSB, Krea University has been featured in the Indian daily newspaper Mid-Day.  

In the interview, Dr Saminadan discusses his journey as a fiction author of two books – Gauri..!! and The Deception Moment, the inspiration behind his stories, and his upcoming literary projects.

Read the interview here

Srijani Mukhopadhyay from SIAS pens articles for ThePrint

Ram Kumar Student Spotlight

Srijani Mukhopadhyay, a second-year student with a major in History and Politics at SIAS, Krea University has contributed insightful pieces to ThePrint. She’s interning under the Opinion and Features team. Her fifth long-form article will be coming out this weekend. It’s an edited version of a paper that she wrote for a course taught by Dr Gowhar Fazili, Assistant Professor of Social Studies, SIAS, Krea University. It’s a look at the unique experience of Bengal Partition through the partition poetry of Bengal.  

Article 1: 
https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/the-mughals-are-overdone-in-historical-fiction-time-to-focus-on-delhi-sultans/2084413/

Article 2:  https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/kendrick-and-drake-are-warring-surprise-surprise-women-are-collateral/2086105/

Article 3: 
https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/deepa-mehta-is-back-with-a-film-on-transwoman-sirat-taneja-all-good-art-is-political/2092220/

Article 4:  https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/no-more-hot-air-talk-delhi-women-want-a-say-on-climate-change-use-art-to-exhibit-struggles/2099242/