Speaker: Shankar Ramaswami (O. P. Jindal Global University)
The development process in India, along with its alleged achievements, has induced multiple difficulties and hardships for poor and working people. In villages, farming families confront an agrarian crisis, with rising costs of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, inadequate irrigation facilities, low prices for their crops, grave indebtedness, and ecological damage to the soil, water, and forests. Due to a paucity of jobs in the countryside, many are compelled to migrate to cities for work.
Once in the city, migrants confront many difficulties. In workplaces, they contend with low-paid, insecure, exhausting, and hazardous work. In neighbourhoods, they deal with congested living conditions, poor qualities of air, water, and sanitation, vulnerabilities to illnesses, and separation from their families in the village.
Shankar Ramaswami is a Professor of Sociology at O. P. Jindal Global University, India. He works on the anthropologies of globalization, migration, urban workers, and religion in South Asia. He completed an A.B. in Economics at Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Jindal University, he was Lecturer on South Asian Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard, where he taught courses on anthropology, literature, cinema, and religion. At Jindal, he teaches courses on global capitalism, autonomous politics, urban ethnography, religion and justice, the Mahabharata, and Indian cinema.
All are welcome
Enquiries: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk or 01865-274559
