Soft Robotics STEMkit: Introducing Cutting Edge Research to School Education
This talk-cum-demonstration will focus on the development of the Soft Robotics STEM kit for students designed by researchers at Harvard Biodesign Lab.
SAI Event Region : India
Meritocracy: Perspectives from China Past and Present
How should societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their full potential and ensuring that competent and capable leaders are selected to govern are central challenges for any society. Failure to meet these challenges can have enormous...
The Past, Present and Potential Future of Coal in India
India’s coal industry is highly contested today. Between the immediacy of coal shortages, the transition to renewable energy, and air pollution problems, the long history of the coal industry and India’s deep economic and social dependence on the fuel gets lost in...
Primary Health Care Reforms in India: Field Lessons from Early Implementation
Location: Kresge G3, HSPH, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA Rajani R. Ved is the Executive Director of National Health Systems Resource Centre in India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and a Visiting Scientist at HSPH. For over ten years, she led the...
Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata Book Talk
Speaker: Karthika Naïr, Author and Poet Moderator: Parimal Patil, Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy, Harvard University In Until the Lions, Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered...
Fractal Urbanization: Spatial Segregation in Liberalizing India
Speaker: Naveen Bharathi, Mittal Institute Raghunathan Family Fellow, 2019-2020 Moderator: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design This presentation will show how residential caste-segregation is independent of city...
Between the Yogi and the Commissar
Between the Yogi and the Commissar: Imagining De-Colonial Science in Postcolonial India, c. 1952–1977 Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania Moderated by Victor Seow, Assistant Professor, Department of History of Science, Harvard...
Property, Power, and Women: Positive and Perverse Consequences of Indian Reforms for Gender Equality
Can political representation help women upend entrenched systems of power? Property and Power, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, finds evidence that quotas improve women’s ability to claim fundamental economic rights. Yet, greater voice is costly, and...
Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India
Economic corridors — ambitious infrastructural development projects throughout Asia and Africa — are dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. As these corridors cut across croplands, the conversion of agricultural lands into new urban uses has erupted in...
“Reason” Film Screening and Discussion
Join us for a screening of “Reason,” an award-winning film, followed by a discussion with the film’s Director, Anand Patwardhan. The screening will begin at 3:30 PM, with the discussion session beginning at 6:15 PM. Speakers: Anand Patwardhan,...
Tools for Urban Conservation in Lucknow: Advocacy, Politics, and Civic Engagement
Urban conservation is often a pressing challenge in historic Indian cities experiencing the pressures of development. Many cities, often lacking any viable local-level policy and enforcement, have resorted to alternative tools, often citizen-led, to accomplish the goal of conservation. This seminar will explore the tools of advocacy, politics, and civic engagement through recent examples from the city of Lucknow in northern India.
Royal City Invented: Mysore in the 20th Century
After the 1880s, Mysore was established as the home of the royal family. Despite its interrupted and uncertain status as a “capital” city, it became the site of an experiment in ornamentalism by the 20th century. It was among the first cities in India to have a City Improvement Trust in 1903, a few years after the Bombay Improvement Trust was set up in 1898. In the Trust’s negotiations with the municipality on the one hand, and the Palace establishment on the other, we see a specific form of material and temporal “ordering” that drew as much on the sovereign power of the monarch — though mediated by an increasingly powerful bureaucracy — as on a creative adaptation of the diverse forces, techniques, and devices more properly associated with “governmentality.” How does the invention of Royal Mysore challenge existing conceptions of the colonial city as a site of modernity?
Speaker:
Janaki Nair, Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University