Our Team

Manali received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles where she trained as a comparative and historical sociologist. Her work encompasses the areas of parties and political articulation, social movements, ethnic and gendered violence, and post-colonial studies. Her current research, which is funded by the ESRC/GCRF Large Grant (£1.76 million), is a comparative qualitative project titled Urban Transformation and Gendered Violence in India and South Africa. Manali's first book State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860-1990 (2007) was a historical analysis of the emergence of two different welfare regimes in India where social democratic parties have ruled consistently since independence. She has also published her research in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Science History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Historical Sociology and Critical Asian Studies, among others. Manali has co-edited two books titled States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (2009) and Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (2015). Dr Desai is Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge.

Nandini is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at ODID and Fellow of St Antony's College. She was Head of Department between 2012 and 2016. Educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge, and trained as a social historian, she is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India (Routledge, 2013), and joint-editor of India and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford History of the British Empire series, 2012) and Persistence of Poverty in India (Social Science Press and Routledge, 2014). While her past research has been on colonial India, her current research is concerned with social and political transformation and cultural change in contemporary India in the wake of economic liberalisation and globalisation. She has published articles on a variety of subjects, including caste, communal and religious politics, urban development, poverty and labour, work and employment, media and politics, and social movement of sex workers. She has taught at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.She is the editor of the South Asian Diversity and Plurality book series of Anthem Press and a member of the editorial board of the South Asian History Series. She is one of the associate editors of Oxford Development Studies.

Garima is an anthropologist and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the ethnographic study of urban spaces, family relations, domesticity, consumerism, changing forms of work as well as the study of ethnographic methods. She holds a DPhil and MPhil from the University of Oxford.

Rangan is the media consultant and film director on The GendV Project, working in Gurgaon, India. He is the Creative Director off Surinder Films in Kolkata, Brand and Corporate Communication Consultant for Reliance Industries India, Faculty at Calcutta Media Institute and Guest Lecturer at IIM Lucknow. He received his D.Phil in Media Studies at Sussex University, UK

Shannon is an urban sociologist and ethnographer currently researching gender and urban transformations in Gurgaon and post-apartheid South Africa for University of Cambridge. He is interested in the intersections of race, gender, sexualities, masculinities, class and development in the urban context of both Gurgaon and Johannesburg. Shannon completed his PhD at the University of Oxford where he used a combination of longitudinal ethnographic methods and visual analysis to study urban youth, masculinities, gender, development and the policing of public bodies in neoliberal India. His post-doctoral research on South Africa builds and expands several themes of his doctoral research and looks at India and South Africa comparatively.

Pratichi is a sociologist and qualitative researcher from New Delhi, India. She is a gold-medalist in Master of Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, and has done her M. Phil and Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her Doctoral thesis is on ‘Storytelling on the Internet: A sociological Study of Popular English and Hindi Webseries’ where she has studied new story-forms and audience participation emerging on the Internet. She is currently working with the GendV Project as part of the India Team at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, using a combination of ethnographic and cyber-ethnographic methods of research. Pratichi has previously taught Sociology at the Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi and the Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies. She has also worked on various research projects around issues of gender, media, markets and identities, independently and with various organizations including the National Human Rights Commission, Krishnaraj Foundation, Human Rights Law Network among others. Her areas of interest include New Media and Popular Culture, Gender and Human Rights, Sociology of technology and Sociology of Development. Besides academics, Pratichi is a trained Hindustani classical singer, an avid reader, an eager cinephile, and keen traveler.

Taanya is currently pursuing her DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford. Her thesis focuses on the social policies used by the Indian government to combat gender-based discrimination, in particular, the use of cash transfer schemes which rely on the disbursement of monetary incentives and imposition of conditionalities to alter parental perceptions of daughters. Her work is situated in the larger universe of the financialization of intimate lives and raises ethical and moral concerns with the use of such schemes in patriarchal contexts like India, their impact on gendered norms and practices, and the manner in which they create the figure of the ‘girl child’ as a subject of political and social investments. Trained as a qualitative researcher, Taanya has previously worked with development organisations like the UNFPA, Centre for Policy Research, Action Aid India on gender and development issues and has taught law and politics at Ashoka University, New Delhi. Her MPhil thesis focused on questions of agency and autonomy for women in multicultural settings and the State response to demands for minority group rights, problematizing notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘consent’ in women’s lives. Taanya hopes to bring her experience of gendered debates and working with women in the Indian context to this project to look at the idea of gender violence in more nuanced, embedded ways.

Anjali is a cultural anthropologist researching gender, emotions, and ethics during a time of rapid urban transformation in India. She is interested in how gender relations shape both the recognition of suffering as well as the ethical response to this suffering. Anjali is pursuing her DPhil at the University of Oxford. In her doctoral research she used evocative ethnographic methods to capture how middle-class married women tell stories about the suicides of women like them. This research examined how women understood what is a life worth living, critically engage with existing ethical norms, and comment on gendered suffering.