Mahanirban Calcutta Research group

Rajat Kanti Sur is associated with CRG since 2020. He did his PhD from University of Calcutta. He has previously worked with TISS (Patna Centre), National Library, Kolkata, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee. He has keen interest in urban studies, popular culture, public health and labour studies. He has published several articles in reputed journals, newspapers and periodicals. He is currently working on the role of cooperative formation as an alternative method to overcome the socio-economic crisis of the marginal and migrant workers.

Solidarity for Survival: Cooperative Building as a Solution to Overcome Vulnerability

Abstracts

Debashree Chakraborty is a Researcher at Calcutta Research Group. She has previously worked as a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Assam University. She has also worked as a Research Associate in an ICSSR sponsored Major Research Project and has taught at the Department of English, Gurucharan College, Silchar. For her Ph.D thesis, she has worked on Climate Fiction. Apart from environmental humanities, her research interests include the intersections of climate change, migration, partition in cultural studies.

Tracing Kaibarta Migration in Barak Valley of Southern Assam

Abstracts

Mr. Afreen Gani Faridi is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Communication and Critical Thinking, JKLU. He specialises in utilising Political-Economy to analyse Constitutionalism, Public Policy, & shifts in Labour Practices. He has consulted on issues of Juvenile Justice & Sustainable Development Goals while working alongside Members of Parliament & International organisations to provide inputs for the Government of India. He has presented his work in multiple International Conferences on the issues of child labour, pastoralism, and education. His work is published in Taylor & Francis, Zubaan Books, & The Bastion.

Mitigating the Impact of Covid & Conflict: Empowering & Securing Futures of Children Belonging to Pastoral Communities in Jammu & Kashmir

Abstracts

Gorky Chakraborty, Faculty, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). He works on development related issues on Northeast India.

Samik Roy Chowdhury, Former M.Phil scholar at Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. He specialises on debates and contestations related to citizenship in India.

Navigating Precarity- Analysing Multiple Narratives of Citizenship in Assam

Abstracts

Debojyoti Das is an anthropologist of South Asia; with a focus on the borderlands of eastern India and the Indian Ocean world. His work is deeply interdisciplinary, bridging his training as an ethnographer with extensive use of visual media and action-based research. His current work focuses on land relations, climate change, migration, and sustainable development issues among marginalised littoral communities in the Bay of Bengal delta. He is the author of the book The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India (2018)In 2021, Das organised, along with Professor Prasenjit Duara, a book writing workshop titled ‘Borderlands as “Third Space”: Hybrid Amorphous Borders and the Imagination of Space in Asia’, which was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) New Paradigm Grant and Duke University’s Global Asia Initiative https://igs.duke.edu/events/borderlands-‘third-space’-hybrid-amorphous-borders-and-imagination-space-asia.
He recently co-convened the First International School on Climate Migration at SOAS (6th June-6th July, 2022) with the support and leadership of Lauren Grant, Earth Refuge. He has contributed widely to area studies periodicals, such as the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region and the Journal of Borderland Studies.

Upasona Ghosh, Senior Lecturer, Indian Institute of Public Health, Bhubaneswar has done PhD in Social anthropology and also done MPhil in Women studies. Her doctoral research was on social determinant of child health in the Indian Sundarbans- a globally known climate change hotspot as a part of health systems research to improve access, affordable and quality health services for the marginalized. Her decade long research experience has a focus on socially determined pathways of impacts of climate change on community health and health care delivery system. Her research aims to understand social vulnerabilities of the communities experiencing climate change and also throws light on the political-economic dynamics impacting transformational changes towards climate resilient health system. Her aim is to build up community based practical knowledge towards a sustainable pathway of change in health policy process for the vulnerable and disadvantageous populations. Upasona also works on vulnerable populations like migrants and Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of India, in order to understand their health and care seeking challenges. In her current capacity as a faculty at IIPH, Bhubaneswar, Upasona is involved in various academic and research activities. This includes teaching environmental health and social and behavioural sciences in the public health management diploma (PGDPHM) and Masters of Public Health (MPH).  

Climate Refugees: Health and Livelihood in the Bay of Bengal- India and Bangladesh

Abstracts

Paula Banerjee, best known for her work on women in borderlands and women and forced migration, is the President of International Association For Studies in Forced Migration. She is a faculty member and current chair at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta, one of the largest and oldest Universities in South Asia. She was also the former vice chancellor of The Sanskrit College and University and former director of the avant guard South Asian think tank called Calcutta Research Group. Winner of many awards and accolades, in 2013 she was awarded the Distinguished Fulbright SIR Award and a Visiting Professorship to SUNY, Oswego. Her recent publications include Statelessness in South Asia (2016), Unstable Populations, Anxious States (edited 2013), Women in Indian Borderlands (edited, 2012) and Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond (2010) which has been acclaimed as a best seller. She is the editor of Refugee Watch and the editorial board member of a number of international journals such as Oxford Journal of Refugees. She has written and edited over 15 books and monographs and has published widely in international journals such as Journal of Borderland Studies, Canadian Journal of Women’s Studies, Forced Migration Review and Journal of International Studies. Acknowledged as a radical and prolific speaker she has delivered lectures in all five continents. She has been a visiting professor in a number of universities including Helsinki University (Finland), Yunnan University (China) University of Paris 7 (France) and New School, New York (USA) and other.

Handbook of Keywords Refugee and Migration Studies
By
Paula Banerjee and Priya Singh

Concept Note

Priya Singh is Associate Director at Asia in Global Affairs (AGA). Priya is a political scientist with a linguistic understanding of some of the regions she covers. Her research encompasses issues pertaining to nationalism and post-nationalism, colonialism and post colonialism, modernism and post modernism, identity, state formation, ethnicity, gender, migration, marginalization, indigenous and minority communities in West Asia in particular and a broader Asian context, in general. Her research work has also been published in peer-reviewed journals and as book chapters. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies. She has been a reviewer for the Routledge Series on Middle Eastern Studies. Her most recent publications include: Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (co-edited volume, London and New York: Routledge, 2021).