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 Mumtaz Ahmad Numani

Dr Mumtaz Ahmad Numani has obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kashmir (2007), a Master of Arts in Modern/Medieval Indian History (2009), an MPhil (2013) and PhD (2019) in Environmental History from the Centre of Advanced Study in History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. He has worked as a short-term research fellow at the Tribal Research Institute, Jammu & Kashmir. Dr Numani has worked as Chief Coordinator and Advisor (2012—2018) of The Peace Gong (now Peace Insight), a global children’s newspaper connecting children for a non-violent planet. He has presented a number of research papers at national and international conferences and published a number of research papers/ book reviews/ book chapters in reputed international publications such as Springer & Rutledge. In 2021 he received the Young Social Scientist of the year Award from the National Environmental Science Academy (NESA), New Delhi. He has also worked as general editor of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union’s (AMUSU) Annual Magazine, The Aligarian-18, for the session 2017-2018. He is an occasional author/ columnist for The Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, and others. His core area of research is environmental humanities with special reference to Kashmir, India.  

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 Sayori Ghoshal

PhD, Columbia University, New York

Dr Sayori Ghoshal holds a PhD in South Asian History from Columbia University, New York. She has around 9 years of experience, which includes her association with University of Toronto as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. She is currently preparing her first book manuscript titled A Sense for Statistics: Constructing Religious Minority in Modern India, which traces the rise and impact of calculative reasoning in formation of community identity and difference in colonial and postcolonial India. Her research has been funded by the International Network for Research in Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), University of Birmingham. She has published in the Economic and Political Weekly and the History Compass, as well as in an edited volume, Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere.

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.

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.