PLENARY SPEAKERS BIOS

Michaeline A. Crichlow is Professor in African and African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University and senior research fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She focuses on the wider Caribbean and the Global South to investigate larger sociocultural and economic forces reshaping the world. She is particularly interested in governance, race, migration, global blackness and development. She is the author of Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (2009) and Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (2005) and co-editor of several volumes including Human Trafficking (2013); Global Affirmative Action (2015); Negritude Revisited (2016). Her co-edited volume on Race and Rurality in the Global Economy will be published by the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University, and SUNY press in October this year. She is currently completing a text on the race, space and the politics of place in Hispaniola, tentatively titled, Governing the Present: Vistas, Violence and the Politics of Place. She is the current editor of the Sage Journal, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics and Power.

Dr. Meena Dhanda is a Reader in Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton. She migrated from the Indian Punjab to the U.K. as a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University in 1987. She has published two books: a monograph, The Negotiation of Personal Identity (Saarbrüken: VDM Verlag, 2008) and Reservations for Women (ed.) (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2008). From 2007, Meena has engaged in transdisciplinary studies connected with caste/race, publishing several papers including: ‘Punjabi Dalit Youth: Social Dynamics of Transitions in Identity’, (Contemporary South Asia, 2009); ‘Runaway Marriages: A Silent Revolution?’, (Economic and Political Weekly, 2012); ‘Certain Allegiances, Uncertain Identities: The Fraught Struggles of Dalits in Britain’ (Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, 2014); ‘Do only South Asians reclaim honour’? (‘Honour’ and Women’s Rights, 2014); ‘Anti-Castism and Misplaced Nativism’ (Radical Philosophy, 2015). From September 2013 to February 2014 she led a consortium for the U.K. Equality and Human Rights Commission on Caste in Britain, producing two reports (Dhanda et al 2014a and Dhanda et al 2014b) which formed a key reference for British public consultation on how caste discrimination must be legally addressed conducted by the UK Government Equalities Office (March - September 2017). Dr Dhanda has served as Chair of the Black and Minority Ethnic Staff Network of the University of Wolverhampton, and for over 25 years she has been an active member of the Society for Women in Philosophy U.K.

Sujatha Gidla is the author of Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in India by Harper Collins India. Sujatha was born in Andhra Pradesh and migrated to America at the age of 26. She lives in New York and works as a conductor in the city’s subways. Ants Among Elephants is her first book.

Dr. Chandraiah Gopani is an Assistant Professor in G.B Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, India. He obtained his M.A, M.Phil and PhD in the discipline of Political Science from University of Hyderabad, India. His areas of interests are Political theory, Post-colonial studies, anti caste intellectual traditions, Dalit studies, Education, Youth and Gender. He is engaged in doing research and teaching of anti caste legacies by focusing on Dalit movements, politics and literature and the role of social movements in shaping the society, state and democracy in south Asia. Presently he is working on the most marginalised Dalits; mobilization and struggles for justice and Dalit Youth: Mobilities and Mobilizations. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on these issues in Telugu region (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana). He regularly writes to the reputed research Journals, magazines and newspapers both in English and Telugu.

Professor Gopal Guru is an eminent political theorist and scholar and a highly regarded teacher based at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier, he taught at the University of Delhi and the University of Pune. Later this year, he is scheduled to assume the editorship of one of India’s most respected academic journals, The Economic and Political Weekly. Guru’s numerous writings— on political theory, radical democracy, Dalit subjectivity and cultural political histories, experiences of casteism, and the philosophical basis of untouchability have been formative in South Asian Studies and the Indian public sphere. His writings include a large number of articles and books included a monograph Atrophy in Dalit Politics, the acclaimed volumes Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Theory and Experience  (co-authored), Oxford University Press, Delhi, and Humiliation: Claims and Context, (ed.) Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2009. In February 2016, Prof. Guru gave the inaugural teach-in lecture on nationalism at JNU at a time when the university was under attack from right-wing forces. The lectures have since been collected in a volume titled, What the Nation Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures, Harper Collins India, 2017

Dr. Sushrut Jadhav is a street psychiatrist and clinician anthropologist in London, UK. He works as Senior Lecturer in Cross-cultural Psychiatry, University College London; Consultant Psychiatrist, Camden Homeless Outreach Services & Islington Mental Health Rehabilitation Services & Lead Clinician, Cultural Consultation Service, Camden and Islington Community Health and Social Care Trust. He is founding Editor, Anthropology and Medicine journal (Taylor & Francis, UK). Dr Jadhav graduated from Grant Medical College, Mumbai, and completed his postgraduate training in psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences, Bangalore. He subsequently obtained his PhD in Cultural Psychiatry at UCL researching white British natives of London. Dr Jadhav’s current interests include 1) examining the cultural encounters between overseas students and staff, including health professionals and patients in the UK; 2) development of intercultural dialogues to engage with acutely unwell psychiatric patients; 3) mental health dimensions of marginal groups with a focus on South Asia; and 4) examining the cultural premise of western Psychiatry. He has taught extensively on medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry programmes, at several national and international Universities, and was advisor to DSM 5 Task Force for Cultural Formulation. Dr Jadhav currently supervises UCL doctoral and post-doctoral scholars conducting research on the cultural appropriateness of mental health theory and practice in low income nations with a specific focus on India. More recently (with Tarek Younis), he is engaged in research on the impact of anti-radicalisation policy on British health professionals and Muslim community in the UK; and field testing political therapy for Dalits (former ‘untouchables’) in India.

Toussaint Losier is an Assistant Professor at the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. teaches courses on African American History, Black Politics, Criminal Justice policy, and transnational social movements. His writing has been published in Souls, Radical History Review, The Journal of Urban History, Against the Current, and Left Turn Magazine. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement with Dan Berger and preparing a book manuscript titled, War for the City: Black Chicago and the Rise of the Carceral State. In his valuable volume Rethinking the American Prison Movement, Dr. Losier shows that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. His study highlighted the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is currently an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship , intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (fall 2013, Minnesota Press), is an ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities. She currently has three book projects under way: 1) Evictions and Convictions: The Gendered Racial Logic of Black Dispossession in New York City; 2) The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas; and 3) Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice.

Shailaja Paik, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, USA, is the author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) and several articles. She is currently working on her second book that examines the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, community and nation in popular culture in modern Maharashtra. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities-American Institute of Indian Studies, Ford Foundation, Yale University, Emory University, Indian Council for Social Science Research, and the Charles Phelps Taft Center, among others.

Anand Teltumbde is professor at the Goa Institute of Management, India. As an activist, writer and public intellectual, he engages with the issues of class, caste, communalism, and political economy impacting common people. He has written eighteen books and numerous articles including The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid (2008) and Republic of Caste (2018). His writings are widely translated in several Indian languages and published in leading newspapers and journals. Economic and Political Weekly publishes his thought-provoking monthly column “Margin Speak”. He is a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights and the All-India Federation for the Right to Education.

Pulitzer Prize winner and National Humanities Medalist Isabel Wilkerson is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson spent 15 years working on Warmth, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century, that of The Great Migration. In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, her book has won the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The Warmth of Other Suns was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon’s 5 Best Books of the Year, and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among others. It made national news when President Obama chose the book for summer reading in 2011. In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting.