Category : In Region
Nov 9, 2022 | Afghanistan, Announcements, Community, In Region, News, South Asia in the News
Tania Saaed, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, and Marie Curie fellow at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, recently arrived at Harvard as part of her Marie Curie Fellowship with LMSAI. Her work focuses on comparative and international education, from exploring Islamophobia and securitization in the context of universities in the U.K., to the increasing securitization of education in Pakistan, and across South Asia. She spoke with the Mittal Institute about her work and fellowship.
Nov 9, 2022 | Afghanistan, Announcements, Community, In Region, News, South Asia in the News
The newly-published book, The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations, is the first collection of chapters related to Partition studies wherein experts of various disciplines from the three major modern nation-states affected by this cataclysm – Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan – have closely collaborated to develop a nuanced assessment of the Partition as active in the present as well as the past. It is edited by LMSAI Steering Committee member Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and Shubhangi Bhadada, Mittal Institute Fellow and Project Director, Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. We spoke with Jennifer and Shubhangi to learn more about the editing process, and what they hope people glean from the compilation.
Nov 3, 2022 | Announcements, Community, Faculty, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) in 1972 and dedicated women’s right activist, passed away at age 89. Often called a “gentle revolutionary” for her Gandhian practitice of non-violence, Bhatt championed the lives of marginalized women across the world through SEWA. With a membership of over 2.1 million, SEWA is the largest Central Trade union, comprised of self-employed women workers across 18 states of India. SEWA works to improve their livelihoods through technical training, microfinance, market linkages, technology, and more. Bhatt is the recipient of a host of honors, including an Honorary Doctorate degree from Harvard University, a Radcliffe Medal, and the civilian honour of Padma Shri by the Government of India. Our Mittal Institute community remembers Bhatt and her lasting legacy in the following remembrances.
Nov 1, 2022 | Announcements, Community, Faculty, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Adaner Usmani, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University, is a recent recipient of a Mittal Institute faculty grant for his project, “The History of Punishment in India.” LMSAI faculty grants support research projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia. Professor Usmani’s particular project explores the incarceration system in India and how, despite low levels of policing and punishment, India has remarkably low levels of (recorded) violence. Professor Usmani’s project aims to solve this sociological puzzle by collecting data to understand the history of violence and punishment in India. We spoke to him about his project, his interest in the field, and an upcoming book.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, India, News, South Asia in the News
Ajmal Khan Areethala, the Mittal Institute’s Raghunathan Fellow, works at the intersection of the environment, development, and climate change. His current research looks at how universal frameworks of climate justice negotiate with local and specific experiences of climate change in regions of South Asia. His Ph.D. in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai looked at the ongoing nuclear expansion policy in India and local responses. We spoke with Ajmal about his work, and his new book.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s leading public policy think tanks. In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at CPR, which is credited with pioneering one of India’s largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education. She is speaking on Rewriting the Grammar of the Education System: Delhi’s Education Reform (A Tale of Creative Resistance and Creative Disruption) at Harvard on Tuesday, November 1 at 5:30pm, and gave the Mittal Institute a preview of her talk.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Associates, Community, In Region, News, Pakistan
The Mittal Institute has been growing its on-the-ground presence in South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Nepal. This series of “dispatches from the region” will showcase the ways in which these outposts strengthen engagement, host visiting scholars...
Oct 19, 2022 | Announcements, In Region, India, News, Students
When Seema Kumari arrived at Harvard last year, she was a long way from home–and not just physically. Her remote village in the Indian state of Jharkhand, near the border with Bangladesh, has just 1,000 people, most of whom are farmers and many of whom are illiterate. Her own parents had little schooling, but her father made ends meet at a local thread factory and pooled expenses with his brothers, sharing a roof with 19 family members. Seema had few paths open to her beyond domestic life–until, one day, when everything changed.
Oct 19, 2022 | Alumni, Announcements, In Region, India, News
For our first Alumni Spotlight, we spoke with the Founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, Piyush Tewari. His story is one of sheer resilience. Piyush turned tragedy into a relentless quest to save lives on India’s roads, which are some of the most dangerous in the world. India holds the global top spot in road crash fatalities and its crash severity of over 31–denoting the deaths per hundred crashes–is the highest amongst the top 20 countries registering the maximum number of road crashes. He also is the driving force behind the groundbreaking Good Samaritan Law that provides bystanders the safety from legal and procedural hassles in the event that they step up to help road crash victims. Piyush graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a Masters in Public Administration in 2017.
Oct 12, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, In Region, India, News
Sristhee Sethi joins the Mittal Institute as the second class of India Fellows, based at the LMSAI Delhi office. Srishtee studies borderlands and migration, with a focus on the lifeworlds of borderland communities and how ‘border management’ encompasses their...
Oct 5, 2022 | Announcements, Bangladesh, Community, In Region, India, News, Partition, Social Enterprise, South Asia in the News
Tariq Omar Ali received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard and is now an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. His research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia and global histories of capital with a particular interest in how the material and everyday lives of ordinary men and women are shaped by transnational circulations of commodities and capital. His first book, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta was published by Princeton University Press, 2018. He will be presenting his new research examining how decolonization, independence, and the rise of the nation-state restructured the working lives of peasants, boatmen, itinerant traders, and small businessmen in post-colonial East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in the 1950s and 1960s at the Tufts-Harvard Conference on the 75th Anniversary of Independence and Partition, October 7-9. Prof. Ali will be speaking on Friday, October 7 at 4:30 p.m. on a panel chaired by Prof. Amartya Sen at the ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Building, Tufts University.
Oct 4, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, News, Pakistan
Liaquat Channa, an educational linguist, joins the Mittal Institute this academic year as the new Syed Babar Ali Fellow. His research interests include language and education, hidden curriculum and language textbooks, language teacher identity, language in education policy and planning. He is a Fulbright alumnus, and completed his Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education with a concentration on teaching English to speakers of other languages and World Language Education from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining the Mittal Institute, he was a Professor in the Department of English at Balochistan University of IT, Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS) in Quetta, Pakistan. We spoke to Liaquat about his research and what he hopes to accomplish while at the Mittal Institute.
