Mahanirban Calcutta Research group

Anita Sengupta is currently Director, Asia in Global Affairs, Kolkata. She has been Fellow, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, Senior Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi and Director, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata. She is an area studies specialist engaged with the study of the Eurasian region. Her areas of interest include issues of identity politics, migration, gender, borders, critical geopolitics and logistics. She has collaborated with scholars in a number of Universities and Institutes in Tashkent, Bishkek, Almaty, Ankara, Istanbul, Sweden, Berlin, Washington. She has been a visiting scholar in Humbolt University, part of the Swedish International Programme on Central Asia (SIPCAS) and the Nordic Network for Research on Migration, Identity, Communication and Security (MICS). Her most recent publication is India’s Eurasian Alternatives in an Era of Connectivity: Historic Connects and new Corridors, Europe Asia Connectivity Series, Palgrave MacMillian (Springer Nature Singapore) 2024 and Anita Sengupta and Priya Singh (eds) China in India’s Neighbourhood: Shifting Regional Narratives, Routledge, 2024. She is the author of Heartlands of Eurasia: The Geopolitics of Political Space, (Lexington Books July 2009); The Formation of the Uzbek Nation-State: A Study in Transition, (Lexington Books, 2003) and Frontiers into Borders: The Transformation of Identities in Central Asia, (Hope India Publications and Greenwich Millennium Press Ltd, 2002). Her book Heartlands of Eurasia: The Geopolitics of Political Space published in 2009 was selected by the Oxford Bibliographies Online in 2011 as a must read on the section Geopolitics and Geo-strategy. She is a regular commentator on debates on Asian affairs. She is member of the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Journal of Eurasian Studies, Ideas and Ideals published by the Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management and Contemporary History of Uzbekistan, published by the Academy of Sciences Uzbekistan. She is also Advisory Board member of Strategic Foresight a journal published by TASAM (Turkish Asian Centre for Strategic Studies) Istanbul and member of Editorial Board of Rising Powers Quarterly, Istanbul, International Research, Society, Politics, Economics, a journal published by the Institute of Socio-Political Research, published from Astana, Kazakhstan. She is a contributor to DNA Edit columns and contributes regularly to public debates as an expert.

BRICS and the Making of Alternative Global Orders

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Byasdeb Dasgupta is the Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published articles in journals and edited volumes on issues such as the external debt problems of developing countries, international trade in the context of India, and labour. He is the author of Unfreedom and Waged Work: Labour in India’s Manufacturing Industry (Jointly with Sunanda Sen). He recently edited ‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx (jointly with Achin Chakraborty and Anjan Chakrabarti) in 2019 and Neoliberalism in the Emerging Economy of India (jointly with Archita Ghosh and Bishakha Ghosh) in 2021. One of his most recent edited books is In Quest of Humane Development: Human Development, Community Networking and Public Service Delivery in India (Springer 2022).

Problems and Prospects of BRICS+ - Inclusive Development, Climate Change and Alternative Finance

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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.

Gender and Minority Rights in BRICS Countries: A Literature Review

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Iman Kumar Mitra teaches modern Indian history at the Department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, India. His research interests include history of the economic discipline, economic history and political economy of South Asia; state and non-state networks of dissemination of economic knowledge, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts and the relations between economic rationalities and governmental reason. His latest publications include ‘The Island of the day After: Digital Epidemiology, Artificial Intelligence and a Biopolitics of Future’ in Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty et al (eds.), The Long 2020 (Singapore: Springer, 2024), 65-78, ‘Marx’s Theory of Rent: A Speculative Reading’ in Achin Chakraborty et al (eds.), ‘Capital’ in the East (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 153-170. and ‘Financialisation of Infrastructure and the Construction of a ‘Seamless Asia’ in Ranabir Samaddar and Anita Sengupta (eds.), Global Governance and India’s North-East: Logistics, Infrastructure and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

Changing Directions in Infrastructure Finance and the Role of BRICS+ in Making of a New Global South

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Paula Banerjee is currently the IDRC Endowed Chair on Gender and Forced Displacement at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok. She was the President of International Association For Studies in Forced Migration. Previously she was the Chair of the Department of South and South East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta. She had held several academic and administrative posts in India and abroad. That include vice chancellorship of The Sanskrit College and University, India and Director, Calcutta Research Group. In 2013 she was awarded the Distinguished Fulbright SIR Award and a Visiting Professorship to SUNY, Oswego. 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.

Precarity, Empowerment, and Digital Labour: Gendered Experiences of Platform Work in India, South Africa, and Brazil

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Priya Singh is an IDRC (International Development Research Centre, Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Gender and Forced Displacement under the Gender and Development Studies program at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok. She also serves as Associate Director at Asia in Global Affairs, Kolkata, and is a member of the Calcutta Research Group, with which she has also been affiliated as a researcher.

Precarity, Empowerment, and Digital Labour: Gendered Experiences of Platform Work in India, South Africa, and Brazil

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Rajat Kanti Sur is a researcher and programme associate at the Calcutta Research Group. He is a member of Vidyasagar Academy, Asiatic Society, Kolkata and Bangiya Sahitya Parishat. He was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna (March 2022). His areas of interest are labour studies, culture studies, social and cultural anthropology & archives. He took courses on Archival Research Methods in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Kharagpur (Dec 2023). He wrote articles on the issues of women workers, sex workers, cultural performances etc.

State of Migrant Labour in the BRICS countries

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Ratnadeep Maitra is presently a doctoral candidate at the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR and an Adjunct Researcher at Asia in Global Affairs, Kolkata. Having received a disciplinary training in Political Science from Presidency College, and subsequently from the University of Hyderabad, his research interests include postcolonial theory and decolonization, visual politics and memory in the Global South in general, and South Asia in particular. His doctoral dissertation investigates how multiple forms of urban infrastructure get (mis)appropriated by contemporary populist spatial projects, how cityscapes get embroiled in them and the broader public reception to such interventions.

Food Security as Foreign Policy: Framing a Perspective from BRICS

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Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. His areas of research interest include: global politics, South Asian politics, and refugees, migration, democracy and human rights in the Global South. His publications include: Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (co-edited with Ayse Caglar and Ranabir Samaddar, SUNY Press, 2024), The Rohingya in South Asia: People without a State (Routledge: Abingdon 2018), Sustainability of Rights after Globalisation (Sage: Thousand Oaks 2012), Internal Displacement in South Asia: The Relevance of UN Guiding Principles (Sage: Thousand Oaks 2005), Living on the Edge: Essays on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (SAFHR: Kathmandu 1997). He was a visiting professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh (2016), a visiting fellow at Dayton Law School, Ohio, USA (2008, 2009), and a Salzburg Fellow (1996). Professor Chaudhury has been contributing regularly to different news channels and news portals in India and abroad on Indian and South Asian politics over the last two decades.

State of Migrant Labour in the BRICS countries

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Shatabdi Das is currently Assistant Director and Research Coordinator at Calcutta Research Group. She has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Calcutta. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, in Austria, in 2022, under the ‘Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration’. Her research interests lie in climate change, city planning, sustainable development, coal hazards, and urban and environmental issues.

BRICS and Climate Change: Debating Issues, Policies, Politics and Actions

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Sohini Sengupta is Assistant Professor with the Centre for Community Organisation and Development Practice, School of Social Work - Mumbai Campus, School of Research Methodology, TISS Mumbai. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, Master of Arts in Social Work from TISS, Mumbai and Bachelor of Science with Honours in Chemistry from Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has experience in working with grassroots organization, drought response programmes and public policy making and has worked with Oxfam and as a research fellow with the World Commission on Dams-Social Impacts Team in South Africa.

BRICS and Climate Change: Debating Issues, Policies, Politics and Actions

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