People | proglo

The Team

Programme Directors

Mario Rutten

Mario Rutten is Professor of Comparative Anthropology and Sociology of Asia at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has extensive research experience on rural entrepreneurship and labour relations in India (Gujarat), Indonesia (Central Java), and Malaysia (Kedah State), and on Indian migrants in Europe (London).

Prof. Rutten has held research fellowships at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen), and at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Currently he is a board member of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Chairman of the Academic Committee of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies; and co-Chairman of the Joint Academic Committee India-Netherlands of ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research) and NWO (National Dutch Scientific Council).

Apart from contributing to international journals and edited volumes, Rutten has authored Asian Capitalists in the European Mirror (1994), Farms and Factories (1995), Rural Capitalists in Asia (2003), and ‘You had a Nice Holiday?’; Stories about Anthropological Fieldwork (in Dutch, 2007); and co-edited Economic Growth and Social Welfare (1993), Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe (1997), Development and Deprivation in Gujarat (2002), Labour and Capitalist Transformation in Asia (2004); and Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia (2004).

Closely related to his academic research, Rutten organised, together with photographer Huib Rutten, several photo exhibitions on ‘Globalisation as Mirror Image: Westernisation in India, Easternisation in the Netherlands’ (2008-2009); and co-directed, together with Sanderien Verstappen and Isabelle Makay, a documentary on Gujarati youngsters in London and their families in India, titled ‘Living Like a Common Man’ (2011).
Link to homepage: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.a.f.rutten/
http://www.aissr.uva.nl/movingmatters

Programme Directors

Carol Upadhya

Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India. She received her Ph.D. degree in social anthropology from Yale University. Earlier she taught sociology at the Post-Graduate Department of SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In addition to directing the Provincial Globalisation programme, Prof. Upadhya co-anchors the Urban Research and Policy Programme at NIAS.

Upadhya’s research interests focus on globalisation, transnationalism, development, class, and social transformations in India, and on anthropological theory and the history of anthropology in India. She has published several papers and book chapters on the Indian middle class, work culture and employment issues in the software industry, caste and class formations in Coastal Andhra, the history of sociology in India, and land rights and adivasi politics in Jharkhand. She is currently completing an ethnographic monograph on work, class and culture among Indian IT workers.

Upadhya is co-editor (with A.R. Vasavi) of In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008) and (with Mario Rutten) of Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe: Towards a Comparative Perspective (New Delhi: Sage, 1997). She has also co-directed, with Gautam Sonti, an ethnographic film series entitled ‘Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry’ (2006) –
visit: http://codingculture.wordpress.com/.
NIAS link: http://www.nias.res.in/aboutnias-people-faculty-carolupadhya.php

Postdoctoral Researcher

Puja Guha

Puja Guha is a Visiting Scientist at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore. Prior to this she has worked as a Research Economist and Programme Coordinator with the Provincial Globalisation programme at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. She completed her doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore in 2010 and MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics in 2004. Dr. Guha’s research interests include international economics, international labour migration and capital flows, and macroeconomic modelling.

Dr. Guha’s PhD thesis topic was on the macroeconomic effects of remittances in Bangladesh. In her research she developed an analytical model to describe the transmission process of the macroeconomic effects of remittances through the economy, by incorporating the micro-foundations of remittances in a general equilibrium framework, i.e., the household demand and labour supply decisions that influence the macro level adjustments in the aggregate price level, consumption, and the labour market.

She has presented her research at several conferences including the Royal Economic Society Conference held in London in 2010, and the Global Development Network (GDN) Annual Conference held in Bogota, Colombia, in 2011. She has published her research in the Economic and Political Weekly. Guha has been associated as a research intern and part-time consultant with various national and international organisations including the Asian Development Bank, Grameen Foundation USA , and the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Government of India.
http://www.provglo.org/sites/default/files/cv_Puja Guha.pdf

Postdoctoral Researcher

Leah M. Koskimaki

Leah Koskimaki is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India. She received her PhD degree in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2011. Her research interests include development studies, political anthropology, transnationalism, youth cultures, and theories of the public sphere. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Youth Publics and Embodied Politics: Genealogies of Development Aspiration in North Indian Hill Towns’, offers a look into the workings of democracy, youth politics, and Hindi-language publics in small towns in the Western Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on this dissertation. Koskimaki has presented her research at several conferences and workshops including the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin's Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison, and Heidelberg University. She has won fellowships from Fulbright- Hays DDRA, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) for the study of Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali, as well as University of Washington’s Vigfusson and Chester-Fritz Fellowships.

Ph.D. Students

Sanam Roohi

Sanam Roohi is a doctoral student in the Provincial Globalisation Programme. Her field research site will be Coastal Andhra Pradesh. She plans to focus on high skilled migrants from the region and the philanthropic activities that they support. Sanam earned a Masters degree in Political Science from University of Calcutta in 2006. She worked for two years with the Calcutta Research Group on the Social Justice Project supported by Ford Foundation. The project resulted in four volumes on Social Justice in India brought out by Sage Publications, one of which was co-edited by her with Prof. Ranabir Samaddar. She also carried out an ethnographic study on Muslim women in Kolkata through the lens of gendered citizenship. This work was published as a book chapter in Counter-gaze: Media, Migration, Minorities brought out by Frontpage Publications recently.

Roohi has also worked for the CIDASIA Programme of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore), helping to organise an international conference CultureAsia, supported by OSI and HIVOS. Before joining the Provincial Globalisation programme, she worked for the Urban Research and Policy Programme at NIAS, for which she carried out a study of the Bangalore municipality’s proposed Transfer of Development Rights scheme and its impact on local neighbourhoods.

Ph.D. Students

Sanderien Verstappen

Sanderien Verstappen is a Ph.D. student in the Provincial Globalisation Programme at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), the University of Amsterdam. The setting of her research is Anand town and its surrounding rural-industrial area in Central Gujarat. She studied cultural anthropology and sociology of non-western societies at the University of Amsterdam and got her doctoral degree in 2004 (MA.Sc., cum laude). Her MA thesis on Bollywood and the Indian diaspora was selected as best anthropology thesis of the year at the University of Amsterdam (Klaas van der Veen Award), and led to a published chapter in the book Global Indian Diasporas, Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory (2007) and several articles aimed at the general public.

Verstappen was trained as a visual anthropologist at the University of Leiden. She made three documentary films during her studies, one of which was shot in India (Pushkar, Rajasthan). Her most recent documentary, co-directed with Mario Rutten and Isabelle Mackay, is about Gujarati youngsters in London and their parents in India: ‘Living Like a Common Man’ (2011).

Verstappen taught introductory courses in the Social Sciences for six years – three years at a college in Amsterdam (Spinoza Lyceum) and three years at BA level (Sociology and Anthropology Department and International School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam).

Link to UvA personal homepage:http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.b.verstappen/

Ph.D. Students

Sulagna Mustafi

Sulagna Mustafi is a doctoral student at NIAS in the Provincial Globalisation programme. Her field research site will be Coastal Karnataka. She plans to focus on the recent upsurge of Hindu fundamentalism in the region and its links with migration.

Mustafi earned a Masters degree in International Relations from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2008. She worked for a year at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta as a teaching assistant before joining NIAS. There she assisted courses under Prof. Anup Sinha, Prof. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, and Prof. Partha Pratim Pal.

She has recently submitted her M.Phil. thesis to Jadavpur University, under the supervision of Dr. Tridib Chakroborty, which studied the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Southern Thailand. She had also briefly worked as a volunteer for the Teach India project launched by the Times of India, from August 2008 to December 2008.