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 Type : Talk
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...
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...
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
Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier
Delusional States is the first in-depth study of state-making and social change in Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shia-majority region of Sunni-dominated Pakistan and a contested border area that forms part of disputed Kashmir. Ali will discuss how Gilgit-Baltistan’s image within Pakistan as an idyllic paradise overlooks how the region is governed as a suspect security zone and dispossessed through multiple processes of state-making, including representation, militarization, and sectarianized education.
Speakers:
Nosheen Ali, Karti Dharti, Institute for Ecological Studies, Pakistan
Ali Asani, Harvard University, will moderate the discussion
Macabre Social Capital: The Families of Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is the most competent, lethal, and loyal proxy of the Pakistani state, operating in India, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond. In this presentation, C. Christine Fair will draw from a narrative analysis of a ten percent random sample of nearly 1,000 biographies of slain LeT fighters to delve into the battlefield motivation of the fighters. She will reveal the dark role that families play in a young man’s decision to fight in Pakistani terrorist organizations, deriving various forms of social capital from a male family member’s participation in so-called “jihad.”
Speaker:
C. Christine Fair, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University
Moderator:
Kristin E. Fabbe, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Data Privacy 3.0: Are We Ready for AI in South Asia?
How can India take advantage of data to achieve its developmental objectives while balancing the need for personal privacy? The recently implemented Account Aggregator framework tries to establish a digital consent architecture to allow post-collection transfers of data. This will unlock a number of financial models to serve those who are not currently part of the formal banking systems. But at the same time, this can have a serious impact on personal privacy. A similar model is being attempted in the health system, and that too has similar repercussions. The speakers on this panel will delve into the interplay between data transfer and personal privacy in both the financial and healthcare systems.
Speakers:
Rahul Matthan, Partner, Trilegal, India
I. Glenn Cohen, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School
Moderator: Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School; Director, the Mittal Institute
This event is co-sponsored by The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.