Bio data of the Experts (Winter School 2018)

Senthil Babu D. is a Historian with the Department of Social Sciences, French Institute of Pondicherry. His research is oriented towards the historical and contemporary relationship between knowledge practices and labour in India, and his work on the social history of mathematical practices in early modern and colonial south India will be published soon. He has also been working on the history of the Kaveri deltaic region and the Coramandel Coast with particular attention towards the dynamics of nature, knowledge and labour in the histories of these landscapes. The interaction between these avowedly distinct spheres in history and contemporary politics needs to be reoriented to address the concerns of working lives, and he is currently engaged in developing these concerns into a research programme at the French Institute of Pondicherry.

Herve Breton is a Professor in Educational Sciences at the University of Tours and a member of EA 7505 – EES. His research focuses on the fields of adult education, work analysis and prior learning recognition and validation, in the fields work and health education, from a hermeneutical and biographical perspective. He is co-director of the journal Chemins de formation (www.cheminsdeformation.fr), president of the International Association of Life Stories in Formation (ASIHVIF), member of the “Explicitation group research”. He coordinated issue 205 of the journal Education Permanente (2015-4) entitled: “Educational guidance, reciprocity and collective action”.

Anne Casile is a Research Fellow at IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development), and a member of the Research Unit PALOC (Patrimoines Locaux and Governance, IRD/ National Museum of Natural History) in Paris. She has been assigned by the IRD in India, and is an Associate Researcher of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP). In the field of spatial and landscape archaeology, her research focuses on water management and the relationship between religion, power, and water control in the making of places and cultural landscapes in Central India. She is currently coordinating an interdisciplinary ANR funded project (MANDU) to investigate the impacts of rainfall uncertainty and monsoon anomalies on societal development and vulnerability in medieval times, and the ways people adapted to hydroclimatic variability, insecurity, and extremes in the semi-arid region of Malwa, around Mandu.

Aruna Chinnappan is Associate Professor in the Dept of Sociology and Head (i//c), Centre for Women’s Studies, Pondicherry University. She has 16 years of experience in teaching and research in the field of gender studies, gerontology and social networks. Her research work focuses on Rural Widows, Elderly Women and Women in Local Self Governance from a Social Network Perspective specifically in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.  Currently she has undertaken research projects on “Health and Wellbeing of Elderly in Pondicherry” and “Parental Involvement in Academic Achievement of Children in Pondicherry”. The research largely focuses on the Social Network as a tool to examine social structure and social support and elucidates the dynamics involved.

Geert De Neve is Professor of Social Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton, United Kingdom.  He is author of The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy (Social Science Press, 2005), and has published multiple articles on labour, debt bondage and social transformation in India, with a focus on Tamil Nadu’s textile and garment industries.  His articles have appeared in Economy and Society, Modern Asian Studies, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Geoforum, Journal of Agrarian Change and Ethnography, among other journals. He has also conducted research on the implementation and impacts of MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu. Geert is also a co-editor of Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption, and Corporate Social Responsibility (Emerald, 2008), of Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader (Berg, 2009), and of Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Isabelle Guerin is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Research for Development (CESSMA, Centre d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales sur les Mondes Américains, Africains et Asiatiques) and Associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry and Cermi. She specializes in the political and moral economics of money, debt and finance. Her current work focuses on the financialisation of domestic economies, looking at how financialisation produces new forms of inequalities and domination, but also alternative and solidarity-based initiatives. Her work draws most often from her own field-based original data and combines ethnography and statistical analyses. She coordinated the RUME survey at IFP and is part of the NEEMSIS survey. She pays particular attention to gender, alongside other sources of discrimination and inequalities. From a theoretical perspective, her work highlights the social, political and emotional fabric of markets, and explores the multiple conditions for (and limitations of) market-based emancipation, in situations characterized by high levels of oppression. South-India is her main area of fieldwork, but she regularly coordinate comparative and interdisciplinary projects (recent one include microcredit in crisis and Fined). She also conducts ongoing reflection on data production conditions, means of combining methodologies and the place of research in public debate.

Vijay Gudavarthy is Assistant Professor at the School of Economics, University of Hyderabad. He received his PhD in Development Studies from Institute of Social Studies, The Hague in 2004. He has been the principal investigator in the project on ‘Assessing and Monitoring the Implementation of Social Security for Working poor in India’s Informal Economy – Case Study of Andhra Pradesh’ funded by Hivos, The Hague during 2010-12. He has also been a Principal Investigator in the project on ‘A Survey of Migration from Western-Odisha to Brick Kilns in Andhra Pradesh’, along with Tathagata.Sengupta, funded by S.R.Sankaran-Chair at NIRD&PR, Telangana, during 2013-16. His research-interests include;  Informalization of Labour, Labour-Networks, Social-Structures and Accumulation, Labour-Circulation, Un-Civil-Development, Informal-Social-Security for Unorganized-Workers and Environmental Conflicts. He has several publications in Economic and Political Weekly, and as chapters in books. His Recent-Publication is a chapter in D.Narasinha Reddy and K.Sarap (eds.) (2017): Rural Labour Mobility in Times of Structural Transformation, 327-345, Springer-Publications; Singapore, co-authored with Tathagata Sengupta.

Helene Guetat-Bernard is Professor of Sociology at Toulouse University (ENSFEA), presently Head of the Social Sciences Department at the French Institute of Pondicherry, India (UMIFRE 21 (CNRS-MEAE). She hold a PhD in Socio-Economy from EHESS, Paris and was Professor of Geography for 15 years. She is working on gender and rural development, agroecology, local food system, care and ecofeminism in different context (India, West Africa, Brazil, France). She has published Verschuur C., Guérin I., Guétat H, (éd.), 2014, « Under Development, Gender », London, Palgrave. She participated in the creation of an international network on gender and agroecology (next meeting is in Recife Brazil in april 2019).

Kalpana Karunakaran  is Assistant Professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. She has written extensively on gender, poverty, women’s labour and microcredit. She is the author of ‘Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India’ (Routledge, 2017). She has been an activist with people’s science movements and has organized women’s microcredit (Self Help Group) federations and ‘Right to Health’ campaigns that included public audits of rural primary health centers and women’s health status. She was an Executive Committee member of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) from 2014 to 2017. She participates actively in workshops and campaigns for gender equality and civil rights organized by women’s rights movements and NGOs.

Nathalie Lapeyre is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaures. She is involved in the movement of institutionalization of gender studies (Head of Master Gender Equality and Social Policies (GEPS) and European Master EGALES) and is registered in the international scientific networks (Co-director of the International Multidisciplinary Research Network MAGE: Labour Market and Gender). Member of the CERTOP-CNRS (Research Centre on Work Organizations and Policies), her topics of researchs explores the analysis of feminization of professions in France and in Europe. Her recent research aims to understand the issues, the implementation and the effects of a policy of gender diversity and equality within companies (advanced technology industry) or local policies. She coordinated, with Helene Guetat (2017, 63) an issue of the journal Cahiers du genre on « Empowerment practices » in a feminist perspective.

Sébastien Michiels is a Postdoctoral fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry (Pondicherry, India). He is also affiliated at DIAL (Paris, France). He holds a PhD in development economics from University of Bordeaux. His research focuses on the links between employment, financial practices and migration dynamics in rural India. He pays particular attention to issues of class, caste and gender discrimination in the labour market. He has acquired an extensive experience in data collection as he was part of two socio-economic surveys: RUME and NEEMSIS, respectively conducted in 2010 and 2016/17 among 500 households in rural Tamil Nadu. He has also conducted several rounds of qualitative interviews in South India between 2009 and 2018.

Thanuja Mummidi is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Pondicherry University, where she has been teaching since 2009. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Madras. Post Ph.D. she was awarded the Urgent Anthropology Fellowship by the Royal Anthropological Institute, U.K. She later collaborated with the Rural Employment and Microfinance (RUME) programme of the French Institute of Pondicherry in researching the impact of income generating activities on women and their empowerment. She also coordinated a project on ‘Forms of Money with the Konda Reddis’ funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, UCl, Irvine. Her specialisation lies at the interface of economic and ecological anthropology, food sovereignity, and issues of rights and development policy of indigenous populations. She started her research on the Konda Reddis, an indigenous population in south India, in early 2000. Her publications are largely with reference to them.

Christophe Jalil Nordman is Research Fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), and is currently assigned to IFP (Pondicherry, India) and DIAL (Paris, France). He holds a PhD in development economics from University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has an expertise in socio-economic data collection and analysis. His research focuses on the various dimensions of labour in developing countries, including the formation of earnings, skills and social networks, discrimination, employment and household vulnerabilities, and the labour consequences of migrations. His former regional focus was North and West Africa, Madagascar, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where he has acquired over the years an extensive field experience, set up research networks and conducted numerous research projects. He is currently in charge of a longitudinal socio-economic data collection within the Social Sciences Department at IFP (NEEMSIS) focusing on households’ financial practises, labour, skills, social networks and mobilities in rural Tamil Nadu (under the general framework of the LAKSMI programme he’s coordinating).

Laure Pasquier-Doumer is Research Fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), and is a member of the research unit DIAL (Paris, France). She holds a PhD in development economics from the Paris Institute of Political sciences (IEP). Her research focuses on inequality of opportunity, by studying the role of social background in the integration in the labour market or in the educational achievement. She scrutinizes the role of the social background on occupational transitions or on the performance of the informal self-employed, with a specific focus on family networks. She conducted various micro-data collection on individuals’ employment in different contexts (Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Peru). She co-edited a book on the informal sector in Vietnam in addition to several academic papers on these issues.

David Picherit holds a Ph.D in Anthropology from University Paris Nanterre and is a Research Fellow at CNRS (France) – Laboratoired’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC), Paris. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, his research explores the articulation between labour, migration, and politics in South India. He has conducted research on seasonal labour migration in construction sector and politicisation of low-castes in Telangana, including issues of debt-bondage, microcredit, and labour brokerage. He has also done extensive fieldwork among Dalit henchmen of criminal politicians-cum-businessmen in Rayalaseema. Beyond political issues, this fieldwork leads him to investigate issues like brokerage and migration industry, criminalisation of labour and red sanders mafia. He has published various book chapters and articles (Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Ethnic and migration Studies, etc) and co-authored a book (Mafia Raj. The Rule of Bosses in South Asia, Stanford University Press, 2018).

Jayaseelan Raj is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Kerala, and Research Associate in the Egalitarianism Project at the Department of Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Bergen in 2014. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for three years at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics before joining CDS.  His publications include a co-authored book, Ground Down By Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21^st Century India (Pluto Press, London, 2017 and Oxford University Press, India, 2018). His main research interests include plantation labour in south Asia, anthropology of development, caste and class, poverty and inequality, and industrial work and social life.

Nalini Ranganathan is Professor, Head of Social Work Department, Pondicherry University where she has been working since 2009. She has a PhD in Social Work from the University of Delhi. She was Head (i/c) Centre for Women’s Studies, Pondicherry University between 2014 and 2018. Dr. Nalini’s research interests are on fields intersecting social work and the workplace. She has researched on social aspects of the workplace inclusive of bullying, women with disabilities, women leadership. Associating herself very closely with social work practice, Dr. Nalini has been closely associated with the government, NGOs and the corporate sector as an expert.

Supriya Roychowdhury has a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has worked as a faculty member at the IIM Ahmedabad, as Deputy Editor, The Hindu, and is currently Professor at ISEC.  Her research is mainly on the impact of globalisation on labour, particularly informal labour and modes of collective organisation of labour in the current scenario. More recently she has worked on migration and urban poverty.  Her work has been published in the Journal of Development Studies, Third World Quarterly. EPW, and several edited volumes.

Binitha Thampi is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai. She has multidisciplinary background with PhD in Development Studies and her research lies in the broad area of Gender and Development. She has several papers in her credit published in international journals and co-authored a book (with J. Devika) entitled New Lamps for Old: Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralization in Kerala (New Dehli: Zubaan). Her recent research focus is in the area of Gender and Labour Geography that explores the relationship between women’s labour and mobility.

Venkatasubramanian G, Sociologist at the department of Social Sciences, French Institute of Pondicherry. His research is on agrarian issues, focusses on labour and related economy, land and water, and mostly drawn from qualitative and quantitative data. He specialised on gender and finance, rural migration and rural urban linkages. At present he is working on gender and solidarity economy, household financial diary and urban water issues.

Vijayabaskar is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He works on political economy of regional development with a research focus on labour and land markets, industrial dynamics and rural-urban transformations as they are shaped by processes of globalization and policy interventions. He uses meso-level frameworks within political economy such as ‘social structure of accumulation’, ‘regional political economy’ and ‘cultural political economy’ that allow a greater role for local level factors to explain outcomes and processes that are underway without undermining the importance of more universal processes such as globalisation and marketisation. He is currently involved in a ESRC funded study on understanding the pathways out of and into rural poverty using a Actor-Network approach in a couple of villages in Thiruvannamalai district.