I am primarily interested in exploring how people make sense of their place in world in relation to complex events. I am currently researching themes in displacement by exploring narratives of the partition of India, which began following the award of the TATA 1947 Partition Archive grant ,which allowed access to the 1947 partition archive. This has been followed by exploring newspaper archives and other texts. I am also developing projects that address questions of being in relation to migrants and questions of belonging. My interests are: Being, Displacement, Victimhood and Violence.
My research and publications focus on the interrelated themes of caste, ethnicity, social movements, and civil society. While my methodology is primarily qualitative, I also employ comparative and statistical analyses in some works. Within the study of caste and ethnicity, my substantive focus is on evolving inter-caste and interethnic relations. I investigate the mechanisms through which group boundaries are maintained, as well as the circumstances and motivations that lead individuals to cross them.
Regarding civil society and social movements, my work concentrates on political change in Nepal since 1990. My analysis of civil society during the People’s Movement II demonstrates that it functioned most effectively as a ‘key symbol,’ crucial for mass mobilization. In social movement theory, a key contribution of my research is the argument that movements can succeed even in the absence of strong organizational or material resources. Alongside these ongoing themes, I have recently initiated a new research project on religion and existential sociology. This project examines how existential questions are transformed in contemporary society and explores the potential of religion—particularly Buddhism—to address them.
Dr. Dev Nath Pathak works in the thematic areas of cultural sociology within which he engages with folklore, performance, humour, and varied art forms. His ongoing projects include melodrama in Asian cinemas, anthropocene in vernacular literature, and parliamentary humour. His supervision of doctoral research encompasses the issues of sensory memory of religious life, visuals of social values, film society movements, humour and kinship, childhood and storytelling, performance and sustainability, and visual arts and cultural politics.
Diya Mehra is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, her past research has focused on the historical and contemporary urbanization of metropolitan cities in India particularly Delhi, metropolitan urban governance, and the contemporary urbanisation of small Indian towns and their rural hinterlands. She is currently completing a collaborative project on the urbanisation of hill stations and mountain environments in South Asia, and in the context of climate change funded by ANR France. Her new research focuses on first, the building and regulation of key infrastructure projects, specifically roads, and second, the management of garbage as a key civic utility in Indian cities and small towns.
My research interests are food, labour, migration and senses. I am in the process completing a collaborative project titled Gastrofeminism. Gastrofeminism is about feminist encounters with new materialities, practices and pedagogies on food and eating. How do we denaturalize women’s role in food systems and recognize how people across genders have used food to resist, challenge and question their role in and around food practices both domestic and commercial?
I am working on migrant infrastructures with a focus on railway journeys and mobile food vending. I have adopted co-travelling as a method to research on railway journeys and plan to expand the project to include other modes of travel infrastructures. One of the artistic iterations of this was titled Smell Trace and was showcased as part of Serendipity Arts Festival, 2026. I am interested to supervise students working on politics of food and foodways in South Asia, gendered dimensions of infrastructure and migrant infrastructures.
Mallika Shakya received her academic training at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and the University of Glasgow. Her primary research engages with the following themes: (i) social embedding of industrialisation and labour movements; (ii) anthropology of work, including shopfloor ethnography; (iii) intersectionality of class. In addition to these, her emerging work has engaged with the following themes: (i) discourses of health and well-being; (ii) nationalism and borderland studies; (iii) social movements and political uprisings; and (vi) South Asian sensibilities and aesthetics, including film, media, poetry, and fiction.
She leads, on behalf of South Asian University (SAU), the workplace component of a collaborative research project on Antimicrobial Resistance among Migrant Workers in the Border Towns in Southern Nepal and Northern India (or, AMR@lab). This project is funded by Novo Nordisk Funden (NNF) and Wellcome Trust. It is conducted in collaboration with Aarhus University (Denmark), Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute (India), and BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences (Nepal). The project collectively employed six full-time postdoctoral fellows. It runs from 2021 to 2026.
Dr Ratan Kumar Roy takes interest in the field of communication and media studies in South Asia. Currently he is doing research on “GenZ in Asia: Understanding Actions and Affective Practices.” In addition, he is collaborating with K-culture Story contents research institute of Kyung Hee University, Seoul to study the transcultural flow of Hallyu in the global south. Some of his other collaborative research includes: Digital Religion and Faith, Communication and Sustainability, Streaming Media Culture and Contemporary South Asia.
Keywords: Media and Communication, Sustainability, Digital Cultures, Bangladesh.
I continue to work around the themes of social movements, knowledge production and how they interact. At one level my work on knowledge production looks at how different forms of state have their specific educational imaginations and I am working on this with respect to India. At another level it pushes the idea of knowledge beyond classrooms and looks at diverse aspects of life, art forms and practices that produce knowledge.
I have been doing fieldwork around the life of a social movement and trying to understand how a movement emerges and dies. This fieldwork has been ongoing for quite some time and I gradually plan to develop a manuscript based on it. Apart from this I have been interested in understanding the social movements/mobilisations in the south asian region and have been working on a volume around the same.
On the area of knowledge systems and making of the human intellect and understanding I engage with the literature around decolonisation and try and see how there is a need to decenter the idea of decoloniality itself through a more open understanding of the core and periphery. Also, without getting the binaries of North vs South or East vs West this interest area tries to look at how one can look at the possibility of concepts from within the South Asian region.
My work is primarily located at the interfaces of political sociology, sociology of religion, sociology of development and sociology of tourism. I have been exploring the various nuances of the concept of civil society, within the framework of sociology of religion and sociology of development. I have also been actively working on the concept of spirituality, and even completed an ICSSR major project, exploring its relevance in drug de-addiction in Punjab.
I am currently researching on the topic, Agritourism in the Anthropocene, whereby I attempt to trace the importance of agritourism for sustainable development, especially in the developing world. Based on my previous fieldwork in Thailand as an exchange scholar, I am trying to locate the models of tourism that would best fit the framework of sustainable development in India, that could make use of indigenous knowledge systems, while seeking to improve the life and livelihood of local communities.
