Category: Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran, Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor of Marketing at IFMR GSB, Krea University, gave a talk on his Purpose, Permanence and Sustainability teaching intervention in the Product and Brand Management elective course of IFMR GSB’s MBA programme during the NBS Global webinar held on 19 March, 2024. 

He was invited by the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS), powered by the Centre for Building Sustainable Value at the Ivey Business School at Western University, to present this as a part of their Teaching Climate Change in Business Schools Virtual Event Series.

In this module on Teaching Climate Policy and Negotiations in Business Schools, he described his practice of a sensitisation workshop incorporating the idea of the economy of permanence of the Gandhian economist J C Kumarappa and the deep purpose continuum of the Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati, followed by the hands-on ENROADS climate action simulation of Climate Interactive and MIT Management Sustainability Initiative. The ideas were well received and appreciated by the audience.

Dr Shyam Kumar Sudhakar, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, SIAS, Krea University delivered a talk titled Application of computational modeling and large-scale data analysis for identifying drugs and managing comorbidities after traumatic brain injuries at IIIT Hyderabad.

Abstract:

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) constitute one of the biggest public health problems facing the world population. Physical trauma to the brain could lead to the damage and subsequent death of the affected neurons, and this could continue for extended periods, causing secondary brain injuries. As a consequence, TBI can cause long-term medical and psychiatric problems. No treatment options exist to date to prevent the cascade of secondary brain injuries.

Dr Rama Devi, Visiting Assistant Professor, SIAS, Krea University, delivered an invited lecture titled Domesticity and Autonomy: Occupational Imageries and Employable Skills of Educated Dalit Women, at the National Seminar on Gendering Social Relations: Caste, Wage Work, Literature and Law organised by Saveetha School of Law, Chennai.

About the Talk 

Education is conceived as a powerful and political instrument to gain autonomy, agency, and empowerment for marginalised communities. For women, it holds the promise of liberation from their economic dependence on men by creating several possibilities to gain economic independence, assertive expression of voice, and navigating the tight grasp of patriarchal norms in their everyday lives. This lecture traces how education intersects with gender, norms of domesticity, and modern occupational aspirations to reproduce the ideal of respectable women in the neo-liberal economy.

Dr Rama Devi has also co-authored a paper with Dr Sawmya Ray, IITGuwahati. Titled We Know What is Good for Her: Hunar and Respectable Work for Women, the paper has been published in the Sociological Bulletin. 

Abstract 

Education is often conflated with women’s empowerment. Access to formal education is considered to possess the potential to usher in the elimination of the imposed dependence of women on men by enhancing their employability and easing their entry into the labour market. This article argues that establishing such simplistic interconnections evades hidden constraints of sociocultural conditions entwined with patriarchal ideologies that influence and even partially prohibit women’s access to education vis-a-vis employment, resulting in their marginalisation in the labour market. Examining the nature of educational access and occupational aspirations, of urban women residing in a Delhi settlement, the article shows that patriarchal ideology impresses and controls the nature and outcome of the education they obtain. In the settlement, while most young girls are pursuing higher education, not everyone is expected to channelise their educational degrees to secure paid employment. Unlike men, women are not encouraged to engage in every form of work as the nature of female occupation is tied to notions of honour and disgrace of the family. Locally prevailing patriarchal norms dictate and define what constitutes respectable work for women. They are permitted to aspire and engage in reputable work.

Read the paper here. 

Shweta Rani, Faculty Teaching Associate at the Centre of Writing and Pedagogy (CWP), Krea University will deliver an invited talk titled Khula Area: On the Urban and the Pathological, as part of the CSH-CPR Urban Workshop series, organised by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) and the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), on 26 March, 2024. 

About talk: Pathology is one of the key factors that informs and structures urban spaces. To explore the relationship between the urban and the pathological, this talk trails the Aedes mosquito, the dengue vector, to trace the intersection of civic, social, ecological, and political in the everyday life of Delhi. Since 1996, the Indian capital city has faced almost a yearly outbreak of dengue, a mosquito-borne viral infection. To control the possibility of yet another dengue epidemic, the gaze of public health authorities primarily focuses on the areas considered inherently ‘dirty’- localities of East Delhi at the margin of the city, situated at Yamuna riverfront, populated by working-class migrants living in the unauthorised colonies. The residents of such areas have to deal with the absence of basic urban infrastructure while also being under the stringent administrative glare for pest control.
Picking up on the usage of the colloquial expression ‘khula area’ by inhabitants of these areas and their administrators to express the ungovernable stubbornness of such regions, this ethnographic shows that while the state works to localise the pathological, it remains fuzzy and deterritorialised. By analysing narratives around the ‘Khula Area’ this work explores how a city is imagined, inhabited, and governed through the prism of the pathological and all things that fall within its shadow.

Register for the Zoom meeting here. 

The World Humanities Report (WHR), coordinated by the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CIPSH), in collaboration with UNESCO, has now been released. Professor Bishnu Mohapatra, Director, Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Politics, SIAS, Krea University is the World Humanities Report (WHR) regional team leader for India and South Asia. 

The World Humanities Report (WHR) presents diverse ways in which the humanities enable us to understand social realities and human entanglements in different regions of the world. In collaboration with UNESCO, the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CIPSH) coordinate the making of this report. Eight core research groups organised regionally (Africa, the Americas, the Arab Region, Australia, Europe, Mainland China, Russia, and India /South Asia) contribute to the fashioning of this report.

On an invitation by CHCI, Professor Bishnu Mohapatra anchored the India /South Asia report. With the help of thirteen critical essays and twelve short video conversations, the India/South Asia report depicts the humanities’ active presence in plural locations, diverse forms, and multiple tongues. Several people were involved in the making of this report, including twenty-nine scholars/researchers drawn from universities, research institutions, and civil society organisations connected to vast swathes of academic disciplines such as history, literary studies, social anthropology, social theory, aesthetics and performance studies, feminist studies, philosophy, cultural studies, linguistics, and musicology.

The report is by no means exhaustive. Its central objective is gestural, which points out how the humanities, despite resource and status-deficits, have enabled critical interrogation of social practices in India and South Asia.  

Read the Report here. 

Dr Anannya Dasgupta, Director, Centre for Writing & Pedagogy (CWP) and Associate Professor of Literature, SIAS, Neha Mishra, Assistant Professor of Practice, Centre for Writing and Pedagogy (CWP), and Sayantan Datta, Assistant Professor of Practice, Centre for Writing and Pedagogy (CWP) will deliver a Krea-CWP Workshop for MA and PhD students of the Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Social Sciences and International Studies, Pondicherry University. The workshop titled Complex Ideas, Clear Sentences: Reading and Writing for Comprehension will take place on 21–23 March, 2024. 

Dr Anannya Dasgupta, Director, Centre for Writing & Pedagogy (CWP) and Associate Professor of Literature, SIAS, Krea University conducted a  Writing Workshop for Students of the ACJ-Bloomberg Business and Financial Journalism Programme, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, on 15 March 2024. The workshop is entitled Lede-ing to the Nuts: Learning Journalistic Writing from Squirrels.  

For more details, click here.