Associates
Associates of the CSASP are scholars in and out of Oxford who work actively with local members of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme and who in turn have access to Oxford libraries.
Shapan Adnan was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Sussex. He has served on the teaching faculty of the National University of Singapore and the Universities of Dhaka and Chittagong, and has twice held visiting research positions at the University of Oxford. His research activities are broadly in the fields of political economy and political sociology, much of it based on ethnographic fieldwork. Shapan Adnan has published on topics including agrarian structure and capitalist development; domination and resistance among the peasantry; alienation of lands of the peasantry and indigenous peoples; causes of ethnic conflict; determinants of fertility and migration; socio-economic and environmental impacts of development interventions; and critiques of flood control and water management.
Email:amsa127@gmail.com
Judith Heyer is an Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College and an Honorary Associate of Queen Elizabeth House. Her current research interests centre on the relationship between rural and urban, and agricultural and industrial, development in South India. She has been exploring this relationship through a longstanding study of villages in the Coimbatore region of Tamil Nadu. Coimbatore is a particularly interesting place in which to study the relationship as it is the site of a dynamic process of rural industrialisation, centred currently on Tiruppur. One of the themes on which Judith has been focusing particularly is the interaction of caste and class in the rural industrialisation process. She has also been looking at the role played by gender. Another particular interest of hers is the role that the state has been playing, both in the neo-liberal and in the pre-neo-liberal era. Judith uses a political economy approach in her work.Email: judith.heyer@some.ox.ac.uk
Craig Jeffrey teaches geography at Oxford University, where he is Fellow at St. John’s College. He has conducted academic research on youth, politics, and education in India since 1996. He is author of three recent books: Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford University Press 2010), Degrees Without Freedom: Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India (Stanford University Press 2008, with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery), and Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Global Youth (Temple University Press 2008, with Jane Dyson). He has a new book coming out next year (with Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss), titled India Today: Economy, Society. Politics. See http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/cjeffrey.html
Email: craig.jeffrey@ouce.ox.ac.uk
Karin Kapadia received her doctorate in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1990. She has been researching in Tamilnadu, South India since 1986. Her several publications include the monograph, Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India (1995) and the edited volume, The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity, Gender and Social Inequalities in India (2002). She currently lives in India and continues her research as an independent scholar.
Email: karin.kapadia@area.ox.ac.uk
Lucia Michelutti has taught on the MSc in Contemporary India, Oxford, since 2009. Before coming to Oxford she held posts at Department of Anthropology and the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. Her main interests are in the intersection between political anthropology and the anthropology of religion. She is interested in the ethnographic study of democracy, questions of identity (caste and race), the production and perpetuation of inequalities, ‘lived’ concepts and practices of illegality, issues of corruption, security and violence as well as secularism, and religion. She has carried out fieldwork in North India (Uttar Pradesh) since 1998 and has worked in Venezuela and on South Asia in comparative context since 2006.
Email: lucia.michelutti@area.ox.ac.uk
Mallika Shakya
is an economic anthropologist with a PhD from LSE and I recently took up Wolfson Research Fellowship at University of Oxford under which I will be developing research collaboration with Professor Keith Hart’s Human Economy project in University of Pretoria. This project investigates the industrial clusters on Nepal-India border towns involving the leading business ethnic group from South Asia – the Marwaris. It is an extension from my doctoral dissertation, which examined the role of cultural capital in Nepal’s industrialization process and the way its industrial structures are embedded within broader social and political hierarchies. My research focused on two key issues that overshadowed the modern readymade garment industry in Nepal – the international trade politics following WTO and the local ethnopolitics following rise of Nepali Maoists. In 2004, I joined the International Trade department of the World Bank where I founded and led an Export Competitiveness Thematic Group (EC-TG) that brought on board leading economic sociologists, business scholars and macroeconomists to jointly work an interdisciplinary framework for industrial development. My handbook on export competitiveness has now been applied in several of the World Bank country operations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. I have advised governments in Asia and Africa on their policies for readymade garment industry. I was the Chief Moderator of Liberal Democracy Nepal forum (LDN) based in the Nepal Study Centre of University of New Mexico (NSC/UNM).Email mallika.shakya@area.ox.ac.uk
Raphael Susewind was research fellow in comparative politics and international development studies at the University of Marburg, Germany and is now with the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. In his studies, teaching and research, he explores the various relations between politics, religion and belonging and between development and violent conflict in South Asia. In addition, he is interested in the culture of the Indian Foreign Service. He did research among Muslim peace activists in Gujarat (monograph forthcoming under the title "Being Muslim and Working for Peace") and on India's diplomacy vis-a-vis Bangladesh (recently published in Journal of International Relations). He currently explores "Muslim belonging" in the North Indian city Lucknow and will be affiliated with the Center for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi for field research.
Methodically, he attempts to integrate sociological, anthropological and psychological approaches.
Email: raphael.susewind@area.ox.ac.uk
Alpa Shah is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She read Geography at Cambridge and trained in social anthropology at the LSE from where she received her PhD. Alpa Shah’s research focuses on socio-economic inequality and efforts to address it. She has drawn on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in adivasi dominated areas of Jharkhand, India, to advance scholarship on indigenous politics, development, environmentalism, labour migration, corruption, democracy, citizenship and the state. Her first book, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India was published with Duke University Press (Durham, North Carolina and London) and Oxford University Press (India) in 2010. Here, she explores how well meaning-indigenous rights activism may unintentionally harm the people it claims to speak for. She sets out a scholarly agenda to bring a class analysis into a culture based politics of indigenous rights activism. Her new research examines affirmative action measures, the impact of education, and insurgency, and extends her comparative interests to Nepal. She has co-edited Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal (with Judith Pettigrew and published by Social Science Press Delhi and Berghahn in Oxford and New York in 2011). She has also made a documentary on the Maoist Revolution entitled ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4.
Email: alpa.shah@area.ox.ac.uk
