Centre for South Asian Studies

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Kanchana N Ruwanpura (PhD, Cambridge) is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.  She and Wilfried Swenden Co-Directed the Centre for South Asian Studies between 2015-2018 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland where she used to work at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh. 

Kanchana’s research spans feminism, ethnic politics, labour and global governance, and feminist critical pedagogies.  She is the author of two monographs (Cambridge University Press, University of Michigan Press/ZUBAAN), four edited volumes and several peer-reviewed academic articles in journals and edited volumes. 

Her research has been funded by the ESRC, NERC-AHRC-ESRC, British Academy, UGC-UKIERI and ERC, where she has been PI or CoI as a team member.  She also holds an editorial post at Gender, Place and Culture and served in the same capacity for Feminist Economics and Geoforum.  

Muttukrishna Sarvananthan (Ph.D. Wales, M.Sc. Bristol, M.Sc. Salford, and B.A. (Hons) Delhi) is a Development Economist by profession and the Founder and Principal Researcher of the Point Pedro Institute of Development (PPID), Point Pedro, Northern Province, Sri Lanka.

He was an Endeavour Research Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne (2011-2012) and Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University in Washington D.C. (2008-2009).

Papia Sengupta (PhD JNU, Delhi) completed her PhD in Political Theory and Indian Politics from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she now teaches. Her interests are in language diversity and rights, decolonization, institutional-mechanisms, democratic and human rights, language-in-education and policies of multiculturalism and gender issues.

Her first monograph titled Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and Politics was published in 2018.  Her next book is called Critical Sites of Inclusion in Higher Education in India. Papia has published in national and international journals including Economic and Political Weekly, Geoforum, International Journal on Diversity, Social Action and Droit et Cultures.  

In 2016, she was selected as fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh and held fellowships at Brown University (2015), Institute of Federalism, University of Fribourg, 2013, Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellowship 2007. She participated in international collaborative research projects funded by ICSSR-NIHSS and the British Academy.

She held visiting professor positions at Rhodes University in South Africa 2018 and at University of Edinburgh in 2016. In 2009, she was awarded the Distinguished Teacher of Delhi University Award for mentoring students. For her work on language-in-education and diversity, she was awarded the Global Solidarity award by International Association for Applied Linguistics, The Netherlands.

Aardra Surendran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. She is trained in Development Studies and Sociology, and works at the intersection of the sociology and social history of labour in India.

Her initial work focused on the public sector and forms of labour collectivisation within it. She is currently interested in questions of labour process, technology, and the organisation of production across formal and informal work contexts ranging from the public sector to construction.

Aardra is also interested in questions of gender and work, public policy and inequality and is involved in major and minor projects exploring these dimensions. Her work has been published in journals like World Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Social Change and Labour and Development, and in edited volumes published by Orient Blackswan and Tulika Books. Aardra teaches courses on labour studies, women and gender studies, inequality, and public policy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is currently Co-editor, Book Reviews, for the journal Gender, Place and Culture. 

Wilfried Swenden (DPhil Politics, Oxford) is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Between 2015 and 2018 he was Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the university.

Wilfried’s current research interests are situated in the following three areas:

1. the comparative study of constitutional dynamics and intergovernmental relations in federal states, especially India
2. multi-level party systems and territorial party politics, in particular the organization and strategies of statewide parties in a multi-level context;
3. the strength and weaknesses of territorial management for governing divided societies and their comparison with other strategies for conflict management, especially in India and South Asia.

His research has been supported by the British Academy, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders) and the Leverhulme Trust.

He has published two monographs, six edited collections and (co-) authored several articles, which appeared among others in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Comparative European Politics, the European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, India Review, the International Political Science Review, the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, Regional & Federal Studies, Regional Studies, Seminar, Territory, Politics and Governance, the Swiss Political Science Review and West European Politics.