Rohit Mujumdar
Rohit Mujumdar is a student of Southern cities and urbanization. His current research attends to the myriad ways in which monsoons' everyday wetness and extreme events weave into the urban majority’s life in India’s coastal monsoonal geographies, and explores the possibilities of decolonizing and democratizing climate change action through multimedia storytelling.
CASI Election Conversations 2024: Rachel Brulé on the Promise and Pitfalls of Gender Quotas in Indian Politics
There are more women holding elected office in India than anywhere else in the world. Much of this is due to quotas, instituted three decades ago, that reserved 33 percent of seats in local offices for women. In 2023, India’s Constitution was amended to extend those path-breaking quotas to the Indian Parliament and state assemblies—a development that will usher in a massive infusion of women politicians at the highest levels of government. Yet, questions have been raised about whether reforms like these lead to just token representation or have deeper effects on governance itself.
CASI Election Conversations 2024: Yamini Aiyar on the BJP’s “Techno-Patrimonial” Welfare Model
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s success over the last decade of Indian politics—and its frontrunner status in this year's Parliamentary elections—has often been ascribed to its welfare policies. How does this "new welfarism" differ from the rights-based approach that preceded it? Where do technological mechanisms, from Aadhaar to cash transfers, fit into this model?
Polluted Transformations of Fluid Commons: Dismantling Ships in Southeast Coastal Bangladesh
About the Lecture:
Stories of Climate Action: Framing and Fabricating Futures in Mumbai
Means to Enhancing Hindu-Muslim Unity in Contemporary India
Rachael Dougherty
Rachael Dougherty is CASI's Administrative Coordinator as of April 2024. They started at Penn in July 2021 as a Financial Administrative Coordinator and have an associates degree in digital media and bachelor's in communication studies with an art minor from Rowan University.
Lalitha Kamath
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist and planner working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance, and the environment. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments.