Dignitaries

Prof. Sujata Patel is currently a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. Earlier she taught sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad and Pune and SNDT Women’s University. An historical sensibility and a combination of four perspectives-Marxism, feminism, spatial studies and post structuralism influences her work which covers diverse areas such as modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, city-formation, social movements, gender construction, reservation, quota politics and caste and class formations in India. She is also an active interlocutor of teaching and learning practices, and has written on the challenges that organise its reconstitution within classrooms and in University structures. She is the author of more than sixty peer reviewed papers/book chapters and the Series Editor of Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society (Oxford, India) and Cities and the Urban Imperative (Routledge, India) and in between 2010-2015 edited Sage Studies in International Sociology and Current Sociology Monographs (Sage, London). She is also the author of The Making of Industrial Relations (OUP, 1997), editor of The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions, Sage London (2010) and Doing Sociology in India, Genealogies, Locations and Practices, Delhi, Oxford (2011) as also a coeditor of five books, Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India (OUP, 1995); Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (OUP, 1995); Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (OUP, 2003); Thinking Social Science in India (Sage, 2002); and Urban Studies (OUP, 2006). She has been associated in various capacities with the International Sociological Association and has been its first Vice President for National Associations (2002-2006). She was the President of Indian Sociological Society from January 2016 to December 2017.

Prof. Shiv Visvanathan is an Indian academic best known for his contributions to developing the field of science and technology studies (STS), and for the concept of cognitive justice a term he coined. He is currently Professor at O P Jindal Global University, Sonepat. He was Professor, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar and has held the position of Senior fellow Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics. He has held visiting professorships at Smith College, Stanford, Goldsmiths, Arizona State University and Maastricht University, Harvard University & Oxford University.

A public intellectual and a social scientist, he is currently located at O P Jindal Global University, Noida. A prolific writer and orator, he regularly writes in national and international dailies and periodicals and remains one of the important critics of the current times. He is the author of many books, some of which are Organizing for Science (1985), A Carnival for Science (1997) and has co-edited the book Foulplay: Chronicles of Corruption (1999).

Prof. Sanal Mohan is currently the director of Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR), Thiruvananthapuram. He was a Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow in History at the Centre for South Asian Studies, SOAS (2002); Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2002-05); Honorary Research Associate in Social Anthropology Programme of Massey University, New Zealand (2004); Graduate School Postdoctoral Fellow, Emory University, Atlanta (2008); Faculty Associate, CASI, UPenn (2011); Fellow, SSRC, New York in the Programme of New Directions in the Study of Prayers (2012-14); Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany (2013), and Smuts Visiting Fellow @ Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (2017-18). Along with several peer-reviewed article length research publications, he has authored the monograph, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Kerala (OUP, 2015).

Prof. Vathsala Aithal is Professor for International Social Work, Faculty of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences Wuerzburg-Schweinfurt (FHWS), Germany. Affiliations: Member of the German Society for Social Work (DGSA)/ International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW). Publications: “Provincialising Europe: Challenges Regarding Transculturality of the Sciences”. In German:”’We Are the Nucleus of the Civil Society’ – Women Movements in South Asia”, “Learning from the Subaltern: Women in India in Struggle for Water and Social Transformation”. Projects on gender, empowerment, mentoring. Current research project: Agency in the Refugee Context. Taught and lectured at several universities in Europe, USA and South Asia.

Dr. Shweta Sinha Deshpande, currently working as the Deputy Director & Associate Professor at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Symbiosis International University, Pune has been involved with archaeological and associated research for the past decade contributing to the field through an analytical approach that is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. Dr. Sinha Deshpande’s extensive research experience includes archaeological excavations at Bronze Age and Early Historic sites where she analyzed excavated cultural artefacts to identify their ‘utilitarian identity and their socio-cultural context’. She has authored, co-authored and contributed to many works concerning early south Asian history, such as the Volume 1 of Gazetteer of Indian Archaeological and Historical Sites (2011), History of Ancient India, Volume II Protohistoric Foundations (2014), and Technology During the Chalcolithic Period in South Asia (2015) in addition to several other books and articles.