The School of Social Sciences has built on a long tradition developed by several leading social scientists of the country. This tradition has evolved, across the three programmes of the school, into a broad-based concern over the challenge of exclusion in India. The three programmes have travelled different paths to pursue an understanding of the processes of exclusion and their manifestation in everyday life.
Anitha Kurup is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Head of the Education Programme. She leads the National Gifted and Talented Education Program in India anchored at NIAS. Her research interests span the broad disciplines of education and gender studies. Her recent publications “Trained Scientific Women Power: How much are we Losing and Why?” and “Trends Report: Creation and Analysis of Database of PhDs in India (1998-2007)” have been widely appreciated. As part of the Gifted Education research, she and her team have developed Indian based protocols to identify the gifted children in the age group 3-18 years for different populations- urban and rural. They have been working on the standardisation of the identification protocols. Along the same lines she is developing a multi-level multi-stage model for mentoring gifted children in rural and urban India. She was part of the National core team that developed a 4-year integrated curriculum for pre-service teachers training for India. As part of the sub-committee, she contributed to the development of disability and special education as one of the streams of the four year integrated pre-service teacher education curriculum. She and her team on Vocational education have initiated an exploratory study on understanding the skill gaps and aspirations of the diploma/ITI holders in the manufacturing sector in Bangalore. The study will be used to develop a research agenda in vocational and higher education in India. Her doctoral work on the quality of primary education in rural India is one of the earliest often cited work on grounded research in classroom processes and school –community relationship in rural India. Prof Anitha Kurup's expertise in gender covers a wide spectrum, from examining conceptual and methodological strands of gender relations to political participation and decentralised governance. Prof. Anitha Kurup was a Member, Governing Board of ISEC, Bangalore, and Member, Academic Council, Christ University. She has several publications to her credit. Prof Anitha Kurup was awarded the Fulbright Nehru Senior Research Fellowship for 2011-2012 and was hosted at the University of California, Davis. Prof Anitha Kurup is also the Chair and Academic Head of Ph.D. Programme.
I am a social scientist, with my training throughout in economics but my interests and writing spanning well outside of the discipline, into economic-sociology, technological change, and the political economy of development. Prior to NIAS, I was with the School of Development at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, for six years. My doctoral work was at the United Nations University / MERIT (The Netherlands), before which I have studied at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS, Trivandrum), Madras School of Economics (Chennai) and St. Joseph's College (Bangalore). As principal violinist of the Bangalore School of Music Chamber Orchestra, I am also involved in the western classical music scene in Bangalore.
My interests lie in technological studies. My focus has been around the economic-sociology of technological outcomes, with conceptual foundations in social constructivist and feminist-historical perspectives on technology. Hence, concerns on social capital and spatiality, inequality, urban transition, social mobility, gender, and caste, have undergrid all my research thus far. Methodologically, I have experimented on and employed various methods such as network analysis, archival work, oral histories, the social construction of technology, focus group discussions, interviews, surveys, and quantitative methods. As a result, the broader political-economy dynamics have always framed the analytical and conceptual setting in every one of my research studies.
I have published in various international journals on technology and society. My latest book, ‘The Social Context of Technological Experiences ' was released in 2020 under Routledge. I also brought out a book in 2015 under Routledge titled Industrial Innovation, Networks, and Economic Development. My third volume (co-authored) is on neoliberal urban transition and digital experiences among street-based sex workers in Bangalore under review with Cambridge University Press.