About the event

Students and faculty in South Asian universities are facing new academic freedom-related challenges. The autonomy of universities is under attack and research work is made difficult as some topics cannot be dealt with anymore and access to some countries for field work or even conferences has been reduced.

Scholars are responding to this situation. This public conference is reviewing the issues as well as the initiatives taken by South Asianists for defending academic freedom, be they based in the region or outside.

Speakers

Amrita Basu

Amrita Basu is the Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Two Faces of Protest and Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India. She has received research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and American Institute of Indian Studies.

Naina Dayal

Naina Dayal teaches early Indian history at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She has published on Puranic Hinduism, the Sanskrit epics and the Pali Jātakas. Her research interests include the period c. 320 BCE to 300 CE, and the history of Delhi in the 20th century.

Mirza M Hassan

Mirza M. Hassan, is Advisor, Governance and Politics cluster, at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Dr Hassan’s research largely focuses on political development, state-business relations, urban governance and local governance, the justice sector and human rights, and related issues in South Asia, the Pacific region, and North Africa. He has more than 20 years of consulting experience on these issues for DFID, The Asia Foundation, The World Bank, UNDP, CARE Bangladesh, and other development agencies. He is well versed in conducting political economy analysis, institutional and stakeholder analysis, and using mixed methods.

Shandana Khan Mohmand

Dr Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where she leads its Governance research cluster. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS); and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Her main area of research is inequality, inclusive politics, and the political economy of development. Her research has increasingly focused on the relationship between democratisation, inequality, and accountability, including in her book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (2019, Cambridge University Press).

Nandini Sundar

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her recent publications include, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (Verso 2019), which has been translated into Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu; and four edited volumes, Reading India: Selections from Economic and Political Weekly 1991-2017 (co-edited, Orient Blackswan, 2019); The Scheduled Tribes and their India (OUP, 2016); Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development (co-edited, Sage 2014); and Inequality and Social Mobility in Post-Reform India, Special Issue of Contemporary South Asia (co-edited, 2016), as well as journal articles on democracy, authoritarianism and academic freedom. She was awarded the M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize, 2003, the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences (Social Anthropology) in 2010, the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research, 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, 2017.

Gameela Samarasinghe

Gameela Samarasinghe is a Clinical Psychologist by training and an Associate Professor in Psychology in the Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She initiated the design of and introduced the Postgraduate Diploma and Master’s in Counselling and Psychosocial Work at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo.

She has over 30 years of experience developing strategies for psychosocial interventions initially among conflict-affected individuals and communities in Sri Lanka and then later in the post-tsunami aftermath. She is the author of many articles and book chapters that discuss the nature and scope of psychosocial work in Sri Lanka and the concept of psychosocial wellbeing. She co-edited “After the Tsunami: The Impact of the Asian Tsunami on Women in Sri Lanka” published by the Social Scientists’ Association in 2009.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University. He was previously at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Aasim works on diverse subjects such as state theory, informality & class formation, colonial history, and social movements. He has published widely in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Peasant Studies and Critical Asian Studies. He is also the author of four books, most recently The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons (Pluto, 2022) & The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (Cambridge, 2018). Aasim also writes a syndicated column for Pakistan's newspaper-of-record, DAWN.

Moderator

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008.

Chair

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies.

Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her most recent book is Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black).

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