Poverty and Inequality

Mukulika Banerjee

Associate Professor in Anthropology

Dr Mukulika’s Banerjee 's current research interests are on the cultural meanings of democracy. Her most recent publication is Why India Votes? (2014) in which she explores the reasons behind India's rising trends of voter participation. She is currently completing a manuscript based on 15 years of engagement with a village in India to explain the sources of democratic thinking in Indian social life. Dr Banerjee was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford in 1994 based on field research in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (North West Frontier Province). It was published as her first book, The Pathan Unarmed (2001); she has co-authored  The Sari (2003), a book on the modernity of fashion, and edited Muslim Portraits (2007), a collection of 12 Muslim life-stories in South Asia.

Alpa Shah

Associate Professor in Anthropology

Dr Shah's research and writing focuses on poor and marginalised people in India and Nepal. She explores the processes of inequality people get caught in and the various ways in which they try to subvert them. She has lived for several years as an anthropologist amidst the people she writes about. Her first book, In the Shadows of the State, was on the indigenous rights and politics of Adivasis in Jharkhand, India. Shah is currently writing a book on India’s Naxalite or Maoist movement, a more than 40-year-old insurgency trying to seize power of the state to create a communist society. She has presented some of this research on BBC Radio 4. Shah is also leading the Programme of Research on Inequality and Poverty, funded by major research grants from the ESRC and the EU. She read Geography at Cambridge, trained in Anthropology at the LSE, and taught anthropology at Goldsmiths until 2013 when she returned to the LSE.

Katy Gardner

Professor in Anthropology

Professor Gardner’s work focuses on issues of globalisation, migration and economic change in Bangladesh and its transnational communities in the United Kingdom. Her most recent research arises from an ESRC-DfID grant, ‘Mining, Livelihoods and Social Networks in Bangladesh’, and involves the role of multinationals and competing narratives of ‘development’ and ‘un-development’ in Sylhet, where Chevron are now operating a large gas plant. The project focuses on corporate programmes of community engagement and discordant ideologies of philanthropy and development.

Ruth Kattumuri

Co-Director of the India Observatory

Dr Ruth Kattumuri's research focuses on sustainable growth and inclusion, including climate change policies in India. Her recent publications examine the evolution of India’s climate change strategies, social protection policies, food security and the Public Distribution System, inclusive education, and corporate philanthropy.

Gregory Fischer

Lecturer in Economics

Dr Fischer is Lecturer in Economics and co-director for the finance programme at the International Growth Centre. His research agenda focuses on combining economic theory, field experiments, and more traditional empirical analysis to understand how economic development works. He focuses on less developed countries, particularly development finance and how firms function. He has previously published on access to finance to promote inclusion in India.

Naila Kabeer

Professor of Gender and Development

Professor Kabeer's research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection, and citizenship. Much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia. Her publications include studies on Bangladeshi women and labour supply decision-making, the impact of social mobilisation and microfinance South Asia and social justice in relation to the MDGs.

Sumi Madhok

Associate Professor of Transnational Gender Studies

Dr Madhok's research interests lie at the intersection of feminist political theory and philosophy, gender theories, the transnational gender analyses of human rights, citizenship, postcoloniality and developmentalism and feminist ethnographies.  In particular, she is interested in questions of agency and coercion, in the new citizenship movements and in the genealogical investigations of rights/human rights discourses,  politics, cultures and subjectivities, both in Southern Asia as well as in Non-Western contexts more generally.  To this end, she proposes a framework of 'vernacular rights cultures’ which she suggests, will help us  conceptually capture the dynamic politics of  rights and entitlements in Southern Asia, while also enabling an epistemic and methodological shift beyond the tired arguments of eurocentrism, cultural relativism or celebratory universalism that  no longer adequately capture the dynamism of the citizenship claims that are increasingly voiced and struggled for.

Kalpana Wilson 

Senior LSE Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development

Dr Wilson is Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development at the Gender Institute. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the experiences of women in rural labour movements in South Asia, the appropriation of feminist concepts within neoliberal approaches, the ways in which race is inscribed within discourses and practices of development, and the involvement of South Asian diasporas in development. Some of her recent research explores how gendered and racialised constructions of women's 'agency' have been elaborated within the framework of a neoliberal model of development. This work also draws on research on the experiences, approaches and perceptions of mainly Dalit women involved in agricultural labour movements in Bihar, India.

Gareth Jones

Professor of Urban Geography

Professor Jones’ research interests are in urban geography, with a particular interest in how people make use of the city and how cities are represented by policy and practice. He is especially interested in policy practice toward the 'slum' and the representations of urban poverty through media, civil society and practitioner expertise. He has conducted research in Mumbai.

Nicholas Stern

IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government

Professor Lord Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Institute, and Director of LSE’s India Observatory. He was appointed President of the British Academy in July 2013. Professor Lord Stern’s research and publications have focused on the economics of climate change, economic development and growth, economic theory, tax reform, public policy and the role of the state and economies in transition. His recent work on India analyses economic development in the Indian village of Palanpur and documents the growing importance and influence of the nonfarm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s.

Professor of Development Studies

Professor Corbridge works on politics and development with a focus both on cross-country comparisons and the political economy of India. He has worked recently on questions of participation, accountability and governance in eastern India. Dr Corbridge’s other recent work on India includes articles on post-Partition Hindu-Muslim violence, economic transformations, and employment assurance schemes.

Tim Forsyth

Professor of Environment and Development

Professor Forsyth specialises in political approaches to environmental change and international development. His research focuses on two key themes: The politics and governance of science and expertise within policy processes, especially for highly contested problems occurring in rapidly developing societies such as India; and the development of deliberative, multi-stakeholder forms of governance that can result in more development-friendly and environmentally effective policy solutions. Prof. Forsyth is currently conducting research on environmental and climate change policy, civil society and governance in several East Asian countries as well as India.

Jude Howell

Professor in International Development

Professor Howell research focuses on the politics of aid and development policy, civil society, governance, and aid and security. She also has experience of gender, labour relations and the politics of policy processes. Professor Howell published on the impact in India of counter-terrorism policies post-9/11.

Shirin Madon

Assistant Professor of Information Systems

Dr Madon has researched the impact of ICTs on government reform initiatives in India for more than 15 years. Her current research studies the development impact of a selection of e-governance projects in India. These projects relate to ICT usage for improving the administration and planning of rural development programmes, e-services applications, telecentre projects, and health information systems.

Sandra Sequeira

Lecturer in Development Economics

Dr Sequeira is a Lecturer in Development Economics and a research affiliate at STICERD. Her research applies a combination of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to four broad themes in development economics: infrastructure and growth, education, private sector development, and public service delivery.

Mahvish Shami

Assistant Professor

Dr Shami’s research focuses on patron-client relationships established between peasants and their landlords. While historically landlords’ exploitative powers are argued to stem from the level of inequality in the rural economy, her research in Pakistan shows that it is the interaction of inequality with isolation that limits peasants exit options and creates a monopolist/monopsonist landlord. Dr Shami is currently exploring the types of collective action projects peasants undertake in villages with varying levels of connectivity.

Rajesh Venugopal

Assistant Professor in International Development

Dr Venugopal’s primary research interests are in the political sociology of development and violent conflict, particularly with reference to South Asia. He has researched and written on post-conflict reconstruction, nationalism, development aid, private sector development, and liberal peacebuilding. His recent publications on Sri Lanka explore the politics of market reform during conflict, post-conflict economics, and military fiscalism.

Mrigesh Bhatia 

Lecturer in Health Policy

Dr Bhatia’s research focuses on health systems in developing countries, including the economic evaluation of health programmes. His India-focused publications include studies on the cost-effectiveness of malaria control interventions; willingness to pay for insecticide-treated mosquito nets in Surat; and the demand side of financing for reproductive and child health services.

Catherine Campbell

Professor of Social Psychology

Dr Campbell’s research interests include public health intervention; health systems and inequality; participatory community development and community health. Her recent India-focused publications include a discussion of the role of community participation in improving mental health care in India as well as a case study from Orissa on improving maternal health through social accountability strategies.

Divya Parmar

Research Officer

Dr Divya Parmar is Research Officer in the Department of Social Policy and in LSE Health and Social Care. Her research investigated the underlying reasons for inequalities in access to health services in low and middle-income countries and how public programs can be made inclusive. She studies the impact of health programs and policies on demand, utilization, health outcomes, equity, and poverty reduction. She has worked extensively in India and Africa.

Shakuntala Banaji

Associate Professor and Programme Director MSc in Media, Communication and Development

Dr. Shakuntala Banaji lectures on International Media and the Global South, Film theory and World Cinema, and Critical Approaches to Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. She is UK Principal Investigator for two large funded projects (CATCH-EyoU, Horizon 2020 & MEC Personalised Media and Participatory Culture in the Middle East). Dr Banaji's research interests include the theory, history and textual study of cinema, particularly South Asian media and Hindi films; the socio-political contexts of audiences, representations of class, sexuality, gender and ethnicity; tensions between popular and elite media; internet cultures; online civic participation; young people, children and cultural identities. She is currently researching the politics, ideologies and pedagogies of different forms of citizenship and participation offered to children and young people via the internet and other media in Europe, the Middle East and India. In particular, she is examining the representation of children and young people in different forms of media, the ways in which participation and agency are construed based on class, religion and ethnicity, and what different groups of youth and children learn from or make of the media they access in their daily lives. Her academic books include South Asian Media Cultures, (Anthem Press 2010), The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation  (MIT Press 2013) and Children and Media in India (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author a mystery novel, Truth Lake, set in India.

Sunil Kumar

Lecturer

Dr Kumar’s key research interests are related to urban poverty and urban housing in South Asia. He is also interested in the informal and formal institutions that act as an interface between these two aspects. His recent research work has focused on housing tenure and the urban poor in India, including studies of the urban poor as landlords and tenants and urban labour market changes.

Tiziana Leone

Lecturer in Demography and Senior Research Fellow, LSE Health

Dr Leone is a demographer with a statistical background and her research focuses on reproductive maternal health and health systems in low-income countries. She has previously studied the role of social networks and community factors affecting family planning choices and overmedicalisation of births. Dr Leone is currently working on projects that analyse the effect of health systems reforms on health inequalities in India and Brazil. Her India-focused publications include studies on gender-based violence and reproductive health as well as the burden of maternal healthcare.

Don Slater

Associate Professor of Sociology

Dr Slater's research falls into three broad areas: the sociology of economic life (in particular, consumer culture and market society); the sociology of the internet and new media; and visual sociology (particularly photography and advertising). His new media research has focused on ethnographic approaches, particularly in the global South. He has previously conducted an ethnography of community radio and internet in rural Sri Lanka, which has been followed by a UNESCO programme of ethnographic action research with nine ICT projects in South Asia, and a two-year DfID-funded programme of comparative ethnographies of new media in India.