Speakers
Ajit Sinha
Ajit Sinha is a Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University. He obtained his MA in Economics from the University of Delhi and PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. Sinha started his career as Lecturer of Economics at the University of Delhi in 1982 and went on to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo, York University, Canada and the University of Newcastle, Australia. In 1999, he joined LBS National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie as a Professor of Economics and taught there for two years. Since then he has been a Professor (and also the Director) at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Maître des Conférences Associé at Collège de France, Paris, Visiting Professor at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, the University of Paris 1 (Sorbonne) and the University of Trento, Italy. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Development Economics at Delhi School of Economics, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at JNU, the Department of Economics at Bombay University, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Open University, UK, Honorary Research Associate at PHARE (University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne) and Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Economics and Politics, the University of Cambridge, UK. He has also served as a member of ‘Research Institutes Committee’ and the National Steering Committee of the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD) of ICSSR. He is the author of Theories of Value from Adam Smith to Piero Sraffa (Routledge, 2010), A Revolution in Economics: The Economics of Piero Sraffa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Essays on Theories of Value in the Classical Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2018). He has also co-edited several volumes and authored more than 40 research papers.
Alessandra Mezzadri
Alessandra Mezzadri is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, London. Her research interests focus on global industrial circuits, labour informalisation and labour regimes; labour standards and ethical consumerism; feminist and social reproduction theory; and India’s political economy. Alessandra has engaged in long-term fieldwork in India, where she has analyzed in depth the formation and reproduction of the garment sweatshop regime, its links to global and local production networks, and its implications for working poverty. She was the India co-investigator for the ESRC/DfID project, “Labour Standards and the Working Poor in China and India,” and sole investigator for the India-focused British Academy project, “The Global Village? Homeworking in the Global Economy”. Her research is published in journals such as Development and Change, Third World Quarterly, Progress in Development Studies, Competition and Change, Oxford Development Studies, and Global Labour Journal, among others, and has featured across several media outlets. Alessandra is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments ‘Made in India’ published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Andrew J. Douglas
Andrew J Douglas is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), where he teaches courses in political theory and is affiliated with the interdisciplinary program in Africana Studies. He is the author of In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition (2013) and is currently finishing two new book projects: one on the Depression-era political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, and another, with Jared Loggins, on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s critique of capitalism. Articles and other writings have appeared in, among other outlets, The Du Bois Review, The C.L.R. James Journal, Constellations, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Contemporary Political Theory, The Review of Politics, Boston Review, and Political Theory. Douglas was a 2016-2017 residential research fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
Anjan Mukherji
Anjan Mukherji taught at Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi till 2010, when he retired as the RBI Professor of Economic Theory. He has also taught at the London School of Economics, the Cornell University and at the universities of Tsukuba and Osaka in Japan. Subsequent to retirement, he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru National Fellowship of the ICSSR during 2011-13. He is also currently the Country Director of the India-Bihar programme of the International Growth Centre (IGC), London. He has been appointed Professor Emeritus at JNU. His research includes studies on micro-foundations of macroeconomics, non-linear dynamics and complex growth processes, development and governance and stability of general equilibrium.
Archana Aggarwal
Archana Aggarwal has been teaching Economics at Hindu College, Delhi since 1990. Her areas of interest have been Macroeconomics and Political Economy. She says that despite limitations at the University she has been trying to expose her students to heterodox and Marxian economics. This also led her to start a platform with some of her students in 2006 which was called Perspectives. As part of this group, they conducted field surveys to help understand the pattern of development pursued by the Indian state especially since 1990s. Apart from this, she has also been trying to understand the condition of labour (especially of labour engaged in manufacturing) in and around Delhi. In continuation of her interest in Marxian theory, she is part of the board of Society for Marxist Studies which conducts residential schools on Marxian theory and organises lectures by well-known Marxist scholars.
Auritro Majumder
Auritro Majumder is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, USA. He received his PhD from Syracuse University, NY, and Masters and Bachelors in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His research specialisations include nineteenth and twentieth century European and postcolonial literatures, social philosophy and intellectual history, and political movements with emphasis on India. He is currently working on a monograph on the Naxalites in India, which looks at the cultural representations of Naxalism from the late 1960s to the present with particular focus on issues of transnational aesthetics and politics. Majumder’s writings have appeared in internationally reputed scholarly journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Interventions, Mediations, and several edited volumes.
Babak Amini
Babak Amini is a PhD candidate in Sociology at London School of Economics. He is a member of the editorial board of Socialism and Democracy. Among his forthcoming and recent publications are the edited books, Routledge Handbook of Marx’s Capital: A Global History of Translation (with Marcello Musto; Routledge, 2018) and The Radical Left in Europe in the Age of Austerity (Routledge, 2016). His research interests include the history of socialist ideas and workers’ control organizations.
Barbara Harriss-White
Barbara Harriss-White is an Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University; Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford; Visiting Professor at JNU, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, London. Since 1969, she has taught Rural Economics and Policy and Political Economy (40 doctoral students and over 40 postdocs), and has helped build new institutions (Oxford’s M Phil in Development Studies in QEH, the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme in Area Studies and the South Asia Research Cluster in Wolfson College. Her research has two streams based on fieldwork – first: agrarian change, rural/food markets, long-term village and urban studies, informal capitalism; second: aspects of deprivation, markets and politics: malnutrition, (capitalism and) poverty, gender subordination; disability and health; destitution, ageing; stigma. She has authored 40 books and 250 papers/chapters. Elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2013, she was awarded the Edgar Graham Prize for originality in Development Studies in 2009, on editorial collective of the Socialist Register since 2003, organised Oxford University’s protest against the Iraq War in 2003. She has been committed to international team research, lately on the measurement of polluting waste in the informal economy, has worked with trade unions in India (Centre for Workers Management and employment in food supply chains) and in the UK (Million Climate Jobs project and employment in agriculture) and with local social enterprise (Low Carbon Hub).
C Saratchand
C Saratchand has his research interests include Political Economy and Heterodox Macroeconomics. As far as Political Economy is concerned, he is interested in research on Marx's critique of political economy and its further development. This would include research on historical materialism including the relation between exploitation and oppression, Marxist formulations on value, money, imperialism, etc. His research involvement in Heterodox Macroeconomics derives from but is not confined to the work of Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, Sraffa and Schumpeter, including a critical engagement with Neoclassical Economics. Currently, this would include an exploration of the relation between Kaleckian and Schumpeterian formulations on the business cycle and innovation, the Sraffian dichotomy between basics and non-basics, the constraints on monetary policy in a capitalist economy, jobless growth in the capitalist periphery, the functioning of the public distribution system in India, an internal evaluation of some issues in industrial organization, etc.
Cherif Salif SY
Cherif Salif SY is the Managing Director of Chérif Salif SY International Consulting Services, headquartered in Dakar. His experience and expertise is in economics, social and political fields: local governance; trade and investment and industrial projects; economic, agricultural and rural development; business expansion within Africa, as well as between Africa and other parts of the world; African private sector development; public and corporate governance.
Chirashree Das Gupta
Chirashree Das Gupta is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU. She holds PhD from SOAS. Her areas of interest include Political Economy of Institutions, Economic History and History of Political Thought.