LOGISTICAL WORLDS : INFRASTRUCTURE, SOFTWARE, LABOUR
RESEARCHERS
REAEARCHERS
ABSTRACTS
Atig Ghosh
Atig Ghosh is a Memeber , Calcutta Research Group, and Assistant Professor, Department of History, Visva-Bharati University. His recent research focuses on migration, statelessness, border towns and development under neoliberalism.
Iman Mitra
Priyanca Mathur Velath, Assistant Professor at the Masters Department of Political Science and Graduate Research Centre, St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore. She is assisted by Kriti Chopra, Post Graduate Researcher, St. Joseph’s College. Her work looks at the state of refuge in India with particular focus on international law and how that affects the practice of granting asylum in India. Her primary interviews in the camps and settlements in Hyderabad are the basis of her analysis of the situation of Rohingyas in India.
Kaustubh Mani Sengupta
Kaustubh Mani Sengupta studied history at Presidency College, Kolkata and at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His PhD, titled “Planned Spaces, Intimate Places: Ordering a City and Creating a Neighbourhood in Colonial Calcutta” studied the process of urbanization of Calcutta from the middle of the eighteenth century up to the initial decades of the twentieth, looking at various spaces of colonial Calcutta and trying to map the ways in which the city was imagined, perceived and shaped. He is currently engaged in a research project studying the role of education and vocational training in shaping the lives of the inmates of the refugee settlements in post-colonial India. His main fields of interests are colonial history with a focus on South Asia, the history of modern Bengal, spatial approaches in history (particularly focusing on urban history), partition and decolonization.
Mithilesh Kumar
Mithilesh Kumar is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. His dissertation tries to understand the evolution of new forms of governance, sovereignty and labour processes and politics in the context of infrastructure. He studied Delhi airport for his thesis. He has earlier worked on logistics of migration, disaster management and governance in Bihar. His interest is in the issues of logistics, migration and labour and politics. He is now currently working on the dialogic relationship between the nature, evolution and innovation of the Indian state with social and political movements in India. He is the author of “Governing Flood, Migration and Conflict in North Bihar.” Government of Peace Social Governance, Security and the Problematic of Peace. Ed. Ranabir Samaddar. London: Ashgate, 2015 and “Statistics , Public-Private Partnership and the Emergence of a New Subject.” Accumulation in Postcolonial Capitalism, Ed. Ranabir Samaddar, Samita Sen, and Iman Kumar Mitra, Singapore: Springer, Forthcoming.
Paula Banerjee
Paula Banerjee, the Honorary Director of CRG, is an expert on Indo-American relations and studied in Cincinnati, Ohio. As part of her current work on borders and women, she has authored numerous papers on women in conflict situations in northeast India. She is a full time faculty member in the Department of South and South East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta. She has authored a book on Indo-US relations, titled When Ambitions Clash (2003), and has co-authored a book, Women in Society and Politics in France. Dr. Banerjee is the recipient of a number of international fellowships including the Advanced Taft Fellowship (1991-1993) and has been the recipient of the WISCOMP Fellow Of Peace Award (2001). Currently she is working on women in peace movements in South Asia and on borders and boundaries in the region. She is now the editorial board member of the Refugee Watch.
Ranabir Samaddar
Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies of the Calcutta Research Group, and belongs to the school of critical thinking. He has pioneered along with others peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His particular researches have been on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. He authored a three-volume study of Indian nationalism, (Whose Asia Is It Anyway – nation and The Region in South Asia, 1996, The Marginal Nation – Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, 1999, and A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947-1997, 2001). His recent political writings published in the form of a 2 volume account, The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, 2007), and the just published The Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2009) have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and have signalled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking.
Samata Biswas
Samata Biswas teaches English at Haldia Govt. College. She has recently completed her Ph D from the Dept. of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad on body cultures in contemporary India. Her areas of interest include gender, visual culture and the body. As part of the ongoing project she is enquiring into the making of Haldia as a logistical space, dependent on, yet not overdetermined by the port.
Subir Bhaumik
Subir Bhaumik, former BBC’s bureau chief (East-Northeast India) , is now senior editor with Dhaka-based bdnews24.com and consultant editor with Myanmar’s Mizzima News. He has worked for Reuters and Time magazine, Press Trust of India and Ananda Bazar group. He has been a Queen Elizabeth House fellow at Oxford University(1989-90) , a fellow at East-West Center , Washington ( 2004) and Eurasian-Nets fellow at Frankfurt University (2009). He is the author of Insurgent Crossfire: Northeast India and Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s Northeast and has edited Living on the Edge and Counter-Gaze: Media,Migrants, Minorities. He writes regular columns on regional issues and defence and security for leading Indian dailies like Telegraph, Times of India, the Hindu and Economic Times and does special features for BBC and Al Jazeera Online. He is closely associated with the Track 2 Kolkata-Kunming (K2K) process involving Indian and Chinese border states and is a member of the Calcutta Research Group.