Dr Koyel Lahiri, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, presented a paper titled ‘The Social Scientist and the Scholar-Practitioner Conundrum: A Search For Ways to Incorporate Non-Materialist Frameworks of Knowing and Being Within Formal Scholarly Practice in Academia’ at the conference ‘Belonging: Practices of Inclusion in Spiritual Communities, the Academy, and Society’ on 21 September 2026. The conference was hosted by the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School.
Abstract of the presentation:
This presentation would like to address the question ‘to what extent do academic ways of knowing exclude full consideration of spiritual realities’, but explore it in the context where the subject of study does not fall under the disciplinary boundaries of religion and spirituality. I enter this question from my location within the discipline of Labour Studies and as a formally initiated practitioner of a lineage of teachings and meditation system called Kriya Yoga. It will draw from the chapter-length postscript of my PhD dissertation (studying street vendors and factory workers) where I discussed the price I paid for trying to separate these two selves, and silencing the latter to fit what I had been trained to understand as ‘good scholarship’.
