Professor Bishnu Mohapatra

DPhil, Oxford University

Professor Bishnu N Mohapatra is a political scientist and poet, an educator and a commentator on society, governance, policy and culture. He is also a Professor of Politics at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University. He had taught politics for more than twenty-five years at the University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Azim Premji University. Additionally, he has held visiting appointments at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, the National University of Singapore, the University of Kyoto, Japan, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He has lectured at several universities in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From 2002 to 2010, he headed the governance portfolio of the Ford Foundation’s South Asia Office, New Delhi.

Professor Mohapatra has published in the areas of identity politics, democracy, minority rights, urban politics, civil society and social capital. He is currently researching cities and their multiple imaginings in history. He is also in the process of initiating a collective research project that seeks to understand the conceptual universe embedded in India’s Bhasa literature.

Beyond academia, Professor Mohapatra is also a well-known Indian poet. He has authored four books of poetry and has translated two volumes of Pablo Neruda’s poetry into Odia. A volume of his poetry in the English translation – A Fragile World – was published in 2005. He has a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi, an MPhil in Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford.

Dr P Arun

PhD, University of Delhi

Dr P Arun holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Delhi. His doctoral research explores the history of telegraph and telephone surveillance and its concomitant effects on fundamental rights and freedoms in liberal democracies. It traces the emergence of communications surveillance, particularly how surveillance in telegraph and telephone communications evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His areas of academic and research interest include law, technology, and politics, with a specialisation in communications surveillance and privacy.

His research has been published in journals such as Indian Law Review, Economic & Political Weekly, Surveillance & Society, and National Law School Journal. He was formerly an Adjunct and Guest Faculty at the Ambedkar University of Delhi and Lakshmibai College, University of Delhi, respectively. He is currently working on the history of telegraph surveillance in British India during 1910-1940, which looks into the surveillance power exercised to control telegraph communications by the colonial state. Such surveillance caused difficulty for people to communicate in colonial India and abroad, leading to the articulation of their ‘freedom to communicate.’

Dr Mohammed Sajjad Hussain

Dr Mohammed Sajjad Hussain completed his PhD in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, under the supervision of Professor Nandini Sundar. His doctoral research focused on the changing nature of work with the rise of labour platforms, specifically examining food delivery workers in Hyderabad. He is currently working on a project that investigates the implications of platformisation on work, with a focus on labour studies, platform studies, and economic sociology.
Dr Hussain is the recipient of the IJURR Writing Grant 2022 and attended the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme in 2019 on a scholarship. His research has been published in the Journal of South Asian Development and The India Forum. Prior to his current role, Dr Hussain worked as an Academic Associate at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore and as a researcher at the Hyderabad Urban Lab. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a BA from Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Dr Nidhin Donald

Dr Nidhin Donald holds a PhD in Sociology from the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. His experience includes his association with the University of Lucerne, Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, St Xavier’s College and Flame University. His core research interest lies in the study of Indian Christianity and the conceptual triad of house, household and family. 

Dr Salwa Yahya

Dr Salwa Yahya holds a PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität, Berlin. She completed her BA in Political Science (Honours) at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, followed by an MA in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an M.Phil in Social Science from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Her research interests include identity politics and civil society in India, political theory, and research methodology. In addition to her academic pursuits, Dr Yahya enjoys films, travelling, and music.

Dr Soham Bhattacharya

Dr Soham Bhattacharya is a development economist whose research primarily focuses on the agrarian question and labour relations in rural India. He earned his PhD in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Economic Analysis Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore Centre.

His PhD thesis examined contemporary tenancy relations in southern Punjab and coastal Andhra Pradesh. Dr Bhattacharya’s research publications address issues of poverty, inequality, and rural labour relations within the Indian context, with contributions to journals such as Economic and Political Weekly and Review of Agrarian Studies. He is currently working on a monograph that explores the trajectories of agrarian accumulation and land use in India.