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.
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 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
The paper Design Thinking View on an affordable public bike-sharing project from India by Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran, Associate Professor of Marketing, IFMR Graduate School of Business, Krea University, has been accepted for presentation at the Academic Design Management Conference (ADMC) 2024.
ADMC is a prestigious international academic design management conference held annually in various locations around the world. This year, it will take place in Delft, Netherlands. Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran will present his paper on 6-7 August, 2024.
Professor Anil Srinivasan, Visiting Professor of Practice, Literature & the Arts, SIAS, Krea University and Dr Sumitra Ranganathan, Associate Professor of Music, SIAS, Krea University were on a panel at The Arts in Higher Education – convened by the International Society for Music Education (ISME) at KM Music Conservatory and represented Krea University for the Global Arts. They were also part of a panel convened by the Parthasarathy Swamy Sabha – Chennai’s oldest music institution – on Music in Education alongside leading classical music exponents. The events were held at the beginning of the year.
Professor Anil Srinivasan was also an invited keynote speaker at the recently concluded Liberal Arts and Sciences Symposium in Ooty – talking about our interwoven approach at Krea. All liberal universities of India were present.
Dr Sumitra Ranganathan presented a 2-hour lecture demonstration in the monthly lecture series at Tyaga Brahma Gana Sabha, Chennai, titled “Gods in Place: pada as worship in Bettiah gharana Dhrupad”. The lecture curated archival materials from her extended fieldwork with the musicians of the Bettiah Dhrupad tradition, bringing together theoretical ideas on the entanglements of place, listening communities and aesthetics, with approaches to archiving and engaging with the archive. The lec dem was held in March 2024.
Dr Rama Devi, Visiting Assistant Professor, SIAS, Krea University virtually presented a paper titled Politics in time precarity: Aspirations, Anxieties and Dalit youths in Delhi at the South Asia Forum Conference organised by the University of Melbourne.
Khula Area: On the Urban and the Pathological authored by Shweta Rani, Faculty Teaching Associate, Krea-CWP (Centre for Writing & Pedagogy), has been selected for this year’s Yale Modern South Asia Workshop (MSAW). This international academic workshop occurs every year in different South Asian locations. It will be in Kathmandu this year on 27 and 28 May, 2024.
The short story Pest Control by Dr Gayathri Sampath, Associate Professor, Strategy, IFMR GSB, Krea University was judged the Grand Winner of Season 6 of the India Writing Project
In the paper titled Caste Concerns in Transgender Communities in India: Contesting Cohesiveness, Broadening Horizon(s) in Sage Journals, Prof Pushpesh Kumar, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad and Sayantan Datta, Assistant Professor of Practice, Krea-CWP (Centre for Writing & Pedagogy) historicise the emergence of an anti-caste consciousness in India’s queer- and transgender-rights movements in India
Dr Sayandeb Chowdhury, Senior Assistant Professor of Literature, SIAS, Krea University has authored an article titled Red Alert: How Cinema Helps the Modi Myth in 360info.org.
