Dr Preeti Sampat, Associate Professor, Sociology & Social Anthropology, SIAS delivered a talk at a panel at Gokhale Education Society’s N.B.Thakur Law College, Nashik, on ‘Landed Property and Exclusion: Gender, Caste, Environment and Liberalism’.
Dr Joya John, Assistant Professor, Literature, SIAS participated in a virtual symposium titled, Minor Literature, Major Stakes: Hindi’s Political Worlds on October 10–11, 2025 organized by New York University & Vanderbilt University.
Dr John’s paper was titled, ‘Hindi in Local, Global, and Planetary Frames: Environment, Climate Change, and the Affordances of Hindi’. The paper analysed how state discourse stymies the language of environment communication and what challenges new global or planetary discourses of climate change pose for Hindi. The presentation was a set of observations based on the work of environmentalist Anupam Mishra, climate translations and contemporary Hindi fiction and poetry.
Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS delivered an invited talk on 14 October 2025 at the National-Level Pre-COP 30 Workshop organised by the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The title of the talk was ’Reconceptualization of climate responsibility and implications for climate finance’.
The workshop was organised by Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in collaboration with the Karnataka Forest Department (KFD), Institute of Wood Science and Technology (IWST), and United Nations Global Compact Network (UNGCN). The purpose of the workshop is to inform India’s negotiating positions on climate change at the Conference of Parties 30 (COP 30) in Brazil in November.
Dr Sabah Siddiqui, Assistant Professor, Psychology, SIAS, delivered a talk at Vidyashilp University for the VU Lecture Series titled ‘The Unconscious Life of Ageing’.
Professor Sivakumar Srinivasan, Dean – Research and Professor, Physics, SIAS has penned an article in The Hindu titled 2025 physics Nobel Prize: the magic of quantum pervades all scales. Professor Srinivasan writes about how even though the laureates’ experiments were conducted in the mid-1980s, the ideas continue to spur research activities in many domains. He also sheds light on how their work emphasises the importance of basic research. Though the work’s original motivation was not quantum computing, its impact on the field amply demonstrates how basic research can foster technological innovations.
Dr Sambaiah Gundimeda, Associate Professor, Politics, SIAS recently penned an article titled Debating Uniform Civil Code: the making of Article 44 in the Constituent Assembly of India published by Indian Law Review.
Abstract
Should a secular state accommodate personal laws in a religiously diverse society? Must legislation reforming personal and cultural practices rest on the consent of affected groups? These questions animated the Constituent Assembly’s deliberations on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC). Initially conceived as a mechanism to harmonize personal laws, the UCC soon became a site of constitutional contestation over secularism, gender justice, and cultural autonomy. Proponents advanced it as essential to civic equality and national integration, while critics warned of majoritarian homogenization and emphasized the need for preserving plural legal traditions and community assent. The Constituent Assembly ultimately located the UCC within the non-justiciable Directive Principles, signalling a compromise between legal uniformity and pluralist accommodation. Revisiting these debates, this article argues that the democratic legitimacy of personal law reform rests not on equality or uniformity alone, but on inclusive deliberation, negotiated consent, and institutional patience within a plural constitutional order.
Sayantan Datta, Assistant Professor of Practice, Krea-CWP has co-authored a paper titled ‘We Will Keep Clapping till the End’: Hijra Narratives on Their Taali published in the latest issue of the prestigious Indian Journal of Gender Studies. The paper is co-authored with Professor Pushpesh Kumar, Professor of Sociology, University of Hyderabad.
In a first of its kind attempt, the authors counter the commonsensical notions of the taali (clap), a quintessential marker of the hijras, a south asian gender-transgressive community. To do so, they draw upon years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with members of the hijra subculture. Focusing on how the taali is deployed to both cement hijra belongingness and as a mode of protest, the authors trace the acoustic underpinnings of what it means to be a hijra in contemporary India.
Dr Panchali Ray, Associate Professor, Anthropology and Gender Studies, SIAS has published an article titled Alienated in one’s own land: ecology, border security, and nationalism in chars of Bengal in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
On October 1 2025, Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS presented a talk as part of our monthly public seminar series on “A new development classification for the 21st century” at Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
About the Talk
Nordic countries are frequently positioned as the leaders of “sustainable development” but their high per capita resource use presents a significant challenge. We propose a refined conceptual framework for sustainable development centering “universalizability” – the capacity for a development trajectory to have be globally adopted without overshooting biophysical limits. Our analysis identifies Panama, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka as having achieved the highest levels of scalable social progress.
Dr Dhara and team leverage this framework to propose a new equity-oriented development classification that aligns with current research on environmental limits. This framework offers an alternative to the prevailing conception of a “developed country”, and enables the identification of replicable development models. Its goal is to offer policymakers guidance toward more equitable and sustainable progress in the 21st century.
Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS was recently on ‘The Boring Climate Podcast’. The conversations revolved around how one-size-fits-all climate solutions often fail and the need to look beyond easy solutions and embrace the complexity of our warming world.