School of Social Sciences

Nisar Kannangara is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Inequality and Human Development Programme, NIAS. His research areas include political anthropology, ethnography of housing, and the autonomous adaptation of climate change. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Pondicherry University in 2019. Before joining NIAS, he was a Project Associate with the Kerala Cultural Museum, Directorate of Culture, Trivandrum, Kerala.

Swati Narayan’s research focuses on the analysis of human development and social policies from an inter-disciplinary perspective, across South Asia and especially in India. Prior to NIAS, she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Development. Previously, she has worked extensively as an independent researcher with a range of international and national non-government organisations and managed South Asian research at Oxfam GB.

She has completed her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS), Mumbai. Previously she has Masters' degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and TISS. She is also an alumna of the Cambridge Advanced Programme in Rethinking Development Economics (CAPORDE) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

For more than a decade, she has also been an activist with a range of civil society organisations.

Chetan Choithani obtained his PhD in Development Geography from the University of Sydney, and prior to his present employment at NIAS he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Studies Institute of Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University. His research and teaching interests include migration and urbanization, food and nutrition security, livelihoods, gender, and social policy, and how they relate to human development, particularly in the Indian context.

Dr Aleena Sebastian is an Assistant Professor at NIAS, Bangalore. Before joining NIAS, she was postdoctoral Fellow in a DBT Wellcome Trust/India Alliance Senior Research Fellowship research project with The Humsafar Trust, Mumbai. Dr. Sebastian secured her doctoral degree from the Department of Sociology, the University of Hyderabad in October 2019. 

Her research interests include the following: Social anthropology in South Asia, kinship and gender (with special reference to the matrilineal Muslim communities), health and Social Policy (with special reference to sexual gender minority communities)