Network

ESRC Project Lead & Network Coordinator

Dr Sally Cawood is a Lecturer in Economic Geography at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. Over the past 10 years, Sally has worked on interdisciplinary research projects on water and sanitation, urban precarity and hazardous labour practices, including manual scavenging, in Bangladesh and India. Sally is a member of the Political Ecologies research cluster at Lancaster, and sits on the advisory board of the Initiative for Sanitation Workers. Sally is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project (2022-2025) on Hazardous Sanitation Labour, and British Council-funded project (2023-2024) on occupational and educational mobility among Dalit minority women and girls in Pakistan, alongside the Centre for Law and Justice.

Former ESRC Project PDRA & Network Coordinator

Dr Pratik Mishra is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He was previously involved in the ESRC project at Lancaster University. His research seeks to draw connections between the fields of labour studies, urban studies, and political ecology. Pratik completed his PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London. His PhD research looked at the everyday politics of labour within a brick kiln cluster on the outskirts of Delhi. His research articles have been published in several journals including Focaal, Urbanisation, SAMAJ and EPW. He is presently also involved in a film-making project on brick kiln workers’ life-worlds.

Network Coordinator

I am an urban and labour geographer broadly interested in migrant mobilities, essential work, social reproduction, unpaid labour, and the future of informal(ised) work in cities of the global south. In 2023, I defended my doctoral thesis in Geography at the University of Cambridge. Using a multi-sited, mixed methods approach combining oral history interviews, archival research, and key informant interviews with housing and labour organizers, my doctoral research explores the everyday lives, politics, and place-making survival strategies of informal infrastructural workers in the city from the long twentieth-century to the present day. With the aid of a redeveloped concept of working-class geography, my thesis proposes a redefinition of labor informalization as the historical and current-day deregulation of social reproduction and argues this deregulation has been a driving force behind the production of the contemporary urban landscape and the privatization of everyday life in globalizing Delhi, resulting in migrant hypermobility, the continued dispossession of the labour of urban endurance, and an uneven working-class politics of anti-depletion.

I am an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. My PhD research is titled ‘Urban Environmentalism and the Political Ecolog(ies) of Caste, Class and Precarious Labour in Indian Cities’. Informed by the situated and embodied approaches to Urban Political Ecology and through ethnographic inquiry, my PhD research focuses on dalit waste recycling communities in Patna to explore the role of their caste-dominated intersectional identities in shaping their ecological subjectivities. I hold a Master’s degree in Social Research from the University of Sheffield and another Master’s in International Studies and Development Cooperation from Yonsei University. I did my undergraduate in Korean Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

I am a doctoral researcher at the Department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence and my work is situated at the intersection of caste and labour. My thesis examines the constitution of sanitation work in colonial Bombay under the Bombay Municipal Corporation between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. By positing sanitation work as an important category of labour that both preserved public health and enabled capital’s free flow into the city, I seek to address how an ‘essential’ yet precarious service as sanitation work came to be institutionalised and associated expressly with Dalit workers.

Dr Ankita Rathi is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, where she is part of a UKRI project on ‘Food Security for Equitable Futures’. Her research work is on issues at the intersection of agrarian change, urban transformation and resultant inequality experienced by precariously labouring families in rapidly transforming rural, peri-urban geographies in India. Her current research examines links between labour precarity and food insecurity, particularly focussing on the gendered and racialised aspects of social reproduction. She received her PhD from the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore in India during which she focused on emerging forms of social pressures and inequality unleashed by the contemporary process of agrarian change and urban transformation occurring in the rural and small towns in a successful agrarian state, Punjab in India. She has been working and writing on aspects of agrarian land transformation, peripheral urbanization, and resultant inequality, and crisis of social reproduction experienced by some families in rural, small cities and towns in specific parts of India.

Natasha Sharma engages ethnographically with the work-lives of manual scavengers in urban Kolkata. She engages with the ideas of social production of space, social reproduction, and political practice in her work. She has previously engaged in research around the labour-force participation of women in India with the London School of Economics. She is affiliated with Queen Mary, University of London for her doctoral research.

I am a member of the Scavenger Community and have faced the caste violence that I have written in my PhD. at TISS, Mumbai. Although I have had the unique privilege to pursue higher education, my story represents less than 0.1% of those from my community, and my mother are still involved in Sanitation work in my hometown. As a victimized part of the system, I hope to change, I believe that I have a highly unique perspective on the issue. It is the need for that perspective that has driven me to do this work, and to bring more attention to this issue through academia, community-based leadership, and the most importantly financial freedom through entrepreneurship.

“Vimal is leadership advisor at Adaptive Change Advisors (ACA) and the founder of Movement for Scavenger Community (MSC), an organization committed to the eradication of manual scavenging in India and bringing education and awareness to the existing scavenger community. Under MSC he also operates the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Community Resource Center which provides career counselling and a small library to disadvantaged students in different states of the country. As a Ph.D. scholar in social work with a focus on “Everyday Caste Violence” at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, he was awarded the Young Professional Fellowship from the Dalit Foundation in 2008, Acumen Fellow at Acumen Funds in 2015, Next Generation Leader fellowship at McCain Institute, USA. Under the study abroad program of Arizona State University he also serves as ASU World Innovator. Vimal holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Social Work from the University of Kurukshetra in Haryana. He was awarded by DAAD research fellowship in 2016 under Student Exchange Program with Westfalische Wilhelms – Universitat Muenster (WWU), Germany. He presented his research papers on caste violence in different universities like Yale University, Michigan State University, Gottingen University, Muenster University, Germany, University of Central Florida, USA, Arizona State University, USA, University of North Carolina, USA, and a special talk on Dirty Work at University of Georgia, USA. In 2018, he started the first fellowship called “Fellows for Equality” for the scavenger/sweeper community of India for building community leadership.”

Priyanka is an early career researcher exploring Storytelling as a research methodology. Currently, their work focuses on the fisherwomen of Mumbai while working at Tata Institute of Social Sciences as a Research Assistant. They have been working in the development sector for the past 6 years with different NGOs and research institutes around the themes of Gender and Informality.

Partho Mukherjee is a Research Assistant at the George Institute for Global Health, working on the ARISE hub- a project aimed at improving accountability and governance mechanisms towards marginalized communities living in urban informal spaces, focusing on health systems. He is currently working on a research-action project aimed at improving health & wellbeing for waste and sanitation workers in India. Partho holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Civil Engineering from Vellore Institute of technology and a Master of Arts in Development Studies from Azim Premji University. His work and research interests include Health Systems & Equity, and Political economy of Labour and Capital.

I joined the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham as an Assistant Professor in 2021. My current research, focused on Dar es Salaam and Kampala, the commercial capitals of Tanzania and Uganda respectively, examines the collective action strategies of informal workers and how these interact with actions of state and private sector actors seeking to manage, control, or accumulate via the informal economy. The primary sectoral focus is trade (market and street vendors) and transport (especially motorcycle-taxi drivers). This project sits at the intersection of the literatures on urban political economy, urban labour informality, and labour organising.

Kelvin is an Urban Geographer and a lecturer for the University of Dodoma (UDOM) in Tanzania. My research interests include: urban poverty and livelihoods, sanitation services and wellbeing of informal workers, urban governance, land tenure systems, rural-urban interlinkages, environment, climate change, urbanization, migration studies and land markets. I am an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholar with a background in Urban Geography, Development studies and Environment. My current research sponsors include: The British Academy: Governing Circular sanitation services to Africa’s Urban poor: The case of Tanzania; REPOA- Strengthening the Gendered Land Ownership and Titling through Land Formalization in Rural Areas: Tanzania.

Affiliation: University of Dodoma (UDOM), Tanzania. Also, visiting research fellow (Lancaster University) under The British Academy sponsored project.

Dr. Hemangi Kadlak, hailing from India, currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Symbiosis International Deemed University, Pune. She earned her PhD from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and holds an MPhil degree in Social Work from Bishop Heber College, Bharatidasan University, Tiruchirappalli. Dr. Kadlak also obtained a Master of Social Work (MSW) from Bharati Vidyapeeth, Pune, with honors in Sociology from Mumbai University during her B.A. studies. Following her MSW, Dr. Kadlak gained valuable experience working with various NGOs. She has a rich academic background, having taught at institutions like SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, Amity University, Mumbai, Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Pune.

Dr. Kadlak is a prolific researcher, with a notable focus on sanitation community issues, the youth of sanitation workers, and their education. Her work has been published in esteemed national and international journals and edited books. Notably, her paper on women sanitation workers is preserved for study at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She’s made significant international contributions, including participation in student exchange programs at Keel University in the UK in 2013, and an International Study Tour to Columbia University, USA, in 2015. She also served as an Independent Research Scholar at the Global Centre for Global Development and Sustainability (GDS) at Brandeis University, USA, in 2016.

In addition to her research, Dr. Kadlak has reviewed papers for journals published by SAGE Publication and BMJ Global Health Journal. She is an Advisory Committee Member for the project “Global advocacy for health, safety, and dignity of workers in sanitation,” initiated by SNV, WaterAid, ILO, WHO, and the World Bank since February 2021. Further, she has undertaken the role of Principal Investigator for the summer 2021 and 2022 semester research fellowship at the International Socioeconomics Laboratory Board, Harvard University, USA. She actively participates in academic conferences, often chairing sessions at different colleges and delivering lectures. She also conducts training sessions for community leaders to enhance their capacity. Dr. Kadlak’s achievements have earned her numerous awards, and she has a YouTube channel named “Dr. Hemangi Kadlak” where she covers topics related to women, education, social, environmental, and economic issues. Her primary research interests revolve around gender, education, intersectionality, intergenerational mobility, caste, and the impact of parents’ occupation on their children. You can explore her work on her YouTube channel.

Dr Divya Jyoti is an ethnographer interested in examining both the experiences of precarious and hazardous ‘work’ as well as the processes and practices that constitute precarity, hazard and vulnerability. Driven by a desire to understand the lived experiences of ‘moral’ decisions and behaviours, Divya is keen to draw attention to what often remains hidden, invisible, and taken for granted in our ‘modern’ lives. Before moving to academia, Divya has spent over a decade working with a range of organisations including governments, business firms and not for profit organisations engaged in enacting the ‘decent work’ agenda. She is currently a lecturer at Lancaster University in the UK in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology.

My research explores caste, surveillance, and resistance among sanitation workers, which is a caste-based occupation in South Asia. My study is interdisciplinary—a combination of social sciences, and science and technology. I am interested in exploring caste surveillance in the creation and reproduction of sanitation labour in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial South Asia.

Nikita is currently pursuing a PhD in Geography at Lancaster University. Her academic pursuits revolve around the convergence of geography and development studies. Her research centres on the intricate dynamics of sanitation policy processes, exploring their interplay with crucial elements such as gender, caste, religion, affect, and political ecology.

Andrew Copolov is a PhD candidate in Architecture at Monash University. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, he practices architecture at Bates Smart. In 2022 he began the Gig Workers’ Hub, an initiative offering food delivery workers a place to meet, rest, access basic amenities, and receive information and support. His research is focused on logistics and globalised labour.

Dr. Shakthi Nataraj is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a Lecturer of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her past research has been with on gender, language, and labour in queer, trans, and sex worker communities in India. She is currently pursuing research and public engagement projects exploring how participatory arts can be used to engage social theory concepts and facilitate community-led research. She also has an illustration practice called The Artful Anthropologist.

Aparna Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University. She completed her D.Phil. from the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Oxford, she finished her B.A. (hons.) from University of Delhi, and M.A and M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Political Science.

Aparna’s D.Phil. thesis titled (Re)moving Waste: Caste, Spaces, and Materials in Delhi examines geographies of waste in relation with the on-going waste crisis and changing social relations among sanitation and waste workers in Delhi. In her research, she argues that the waste crisis is fundamentally a crisis of governance. The present-day solutions to this crisis focus mainly on the removal of waste, i.e., treating it as a matter to be cleaned, emphasizing waste management and environmental abuse. Her thesis posits that the waste crisis is intricately linked with the processes of urbanisation, caste-based discrimination, uneven development and human and non- human infrastructure. As the crisis is mushrooming across the city, it occupies ‘discarded spaces’ and marginalised lives (lower caste lives in Indian context). Based on one-and-half year long ethnographic field work and archival research, she examines the crisis through the lens of politico-technical waste infrastructures and social relations and place it within the larger thematic of urban sociology, ecology and value struggles. Through a focus on waste workers—sanitation workers, waste pickers, garbage collectors and recyclers across different spaces in Delhi, her thesis explores flows and forms of waste and changing social caste-based social relations and hierarchies, claims for social justice and how they are shaped by the changing materiality of waste and socio-economic-ecological transformations.

Her research interests lie in the fields of urban sociology, waste studies, labour studies, anti-caste studies, political ecology, and Indian politics. She is currently working on perceptions of environment around waste sites in Delhi.

Graham Jeffery is Director of the Protracted Crisis Research Centre and Professor in Arts and Media Practice at the University of the West of Scotland. With Dr Ben Parry of Bath Spa University, he co-founded Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai, a making and thinking space located alongside the ‘go-downs’ of Dharavi’s informal plastic recycling industry. He recently co-edited ‘Waste Work: the art of survival in Dharavi‘ (Wunderkammer Press, 2023) which documents the principles, pedagogies and practices that underpin the work of C13 Lab. He is developing new projects and collaborations which explore the entanglements of waste flows, subaltern livelihoods, media representations and climate justice using creative and participatory methods.

Dr Nabeela Ahmed is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. Nabeela works primarily on India and Bangladesh on questions of urban precarity in relation to labour migrants working in the informal sectors of construction, industry and domestic work. She looks at these questions through the lens of gender intersecting with class and contextual registers of race (e.g. caste and religion).

Prima is a social researcher and activist with over a decade of experience in public health and development. Their research uses creative and collaborative methodologies to address health inequalities among marginalised communities around the world.

Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist who teaches at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has written on the politics and uneven impacts of urban governance and infrastructure projects, focusing on water and housing. She has also engaged with questions of public participation and citizen collective action in governance and urban planning in her writing and through membership in different city collectives in Bengaluru and Mumbai. Since 2017, she has been engaged in ethnographic work in fishing communities on Mumbai’s east coast to understand changing conceptions of urban climates, habitation, labour and value at the water’s edge.

Dr. Jasmine Fledderjohann is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. She holds a dual-title PhD in Sociology and Demography from the Pennsylvania State University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the University of Oxford before joining Lancaster in 2016. Since 2020, she has been leading the Food Security for Equitable Futures project, a UKRI funded Future Leaders Fellowship examining the consequences and measurement of food insecurity in Global Majority countries. She is a mixed-methods researcher with interests in the social causes and consequences of food insecurity, reproductive justice, and social justice in the design and application of digital technology.

Dr. Amita Bhakta is an independent researcher interested in how intersectionality impacts upon the lives of sanitation workers and assessing the extent to which equity and inclusion  approaches in development consider their rights, with  a particular focus on sanitation labour in India. She has previously written about the need for inclusive approaches for sanitation workers and about the role of artificial intelligence in eliminating manual scavenging. Amita was on the organising committee for the first Sanitation Workers Forum in 2021. She has worked with colleagues in Pakistan to analyse data  collected about the experiences of Christian sanitation workers in Lahore, and supported the Brown Gold project at the Institute of Development  Studies to understand how marginality can be fully considered when researching with sanitation workers in Nepal.

Dr. Pradeep S. Salve is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population and Development at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai. His research interest areas are Population studies, Public and community Health, Violence against women, Maternal and child health, Occupational health hazards, Caste and gender. He has been teaching the Gender health and development, Healthcare system and policies and Occupation health, Historical demography. He has been working with sanitation workers to understand the intersectionality of Caste, Gender and Occupation for last six years. He has published research papers analyzing the health risks, morbidity and mortality among sanitation workers in Mumbai. He has five years of teaching and 10 years of research experience in the field population studies. He is a BIARI-Fellow-2015 at Brown International Advanced Research Institutes in Brown University, USA. He has been engaged in monitoring and evaluation of the National Health Missions, National Health Flagship Programmes and Public Health Facilities in India. He is also one of the Principal Investigator of the “Global Adult Tobacco Survey – 3” and “Mapping the risk factors and consequences of violence against women in India.” funded by the MoHFW and BMGF respectively. He is working with various large-scale survey data including National Family Health Survey (NFHS), GATS, Longitudinal Ageing Study of India (LASI), and Health Management Information System (HMIS). He is also commission member of the different Socially Backward Caste/Classes Commissions of Maharashtra State. He has published several research articles in peer-reviewed international journals.

His academic and research details are given at:

IIPS Faulty Profile: https://www.iipsindia.ac.in/department-faculties/4385 ,

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6879-1246

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WnqqWZoAAAAJ&hl=en

Ajeet Kumar Pankaj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work, Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Regional Campus Manipur, India. He is author of ‘Dalit Migrants: Assertion, Emancipation, and Social Change’ published by Springer International. His research interests cover Caste, Migration, Exclusion, Social Policy, Community Development, and Gig Work. He has also been recipient of ‘PhD Contact Grant’ fellowship funded by DAAD, Germany in 2017. He has published several articles in national and international journals like Community Development Journal, International Journal of Community and Social Development, Journal of Social Work with Groups, Journal of African and Asian Studies, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Recently he was awarded K2A mobility grant for South Asia mobility by Swissnex, Consulate General of Switzerland, under which he was Visiting Faculty at the Department of Social Work and Sociology, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

Barathi is an MPhil student at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford where her research focuses on the intersections of waste, labour, municipal governance, and colonial urbanism.

Hariprasad V. M. is a doctoral researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. He is currently working as a member of a multi-country project led by IDS Sussex, which focuses on sustainable sanitation in small towns across India, Nepal, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Hariprasad’s Ph.D. research examines the marginality and agency of sanitation workers in Alleppey, Kerala. His work delves into the hazardous conditions faced by sanitation labourers in both formal and informal settings. His research bridges labour studies and urban studies with a focus on the WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) domain.

Kailash Chandro is a dedicated Dalit human rights defender, researcher, and activist deeply entrenched in the socio-political landscape of Bangladesh. His collaboration with international bodies, including Arisa based in the Netherlands and various academics such as Sally Cawood from the UK, underscores his global reach and commitment to leveraging international expertise in his advocacy work. Kailash’s career is marked by his staunch advocacy for the rights of the marginalized Dalit community in Bangladesh. His leadership roles span from being the Professional Volunteer with Nepal’s Samata Foundation to conducting field-defining research on the plight of sanitation workers and manual scavengers in South Asia. His work has not only illuminated the challenges faced by these communities but also fostered actionable change through policy and social reform. In 2018, Kailash played a critical role in an exchange program supported by the Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC), where he contributed to enriching dialogues around the rights and empowerment of Dalit communities and minorities. He has demonstrated exceptional leadership and organizational capabilities as evidenced by his efforts in orchestrating national and international conferences, including his participation in the 4th International People’s Health Conference in Savar, Bangladesh, and his significant contributions at the International Conference on Minority Issues in Kolkata. His publications, including a detailed analysis of caste-based discrimination in the leather industry across India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, have been influential in shaping discussions at an international level. A passionate leader within the “Bangladesh Dalit Human Rights (BDHR), Bangladesh Dalit and Excluded Rights Movement (BDERM) and the Bangladesh Rabidas Forum (BRF), Kailash continues to drive significant social change. His dream is a future where the Dalit and minorities community not only regains its rightful societal position but also becomes an integral part of Bangladesh’s developmental story. His work, grounded in a profound commitment to justice and equality, makes him a formidable force in the fight against discrimination and for the empowerment of the Dalit community and minority also.

Aditya Sarkar is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, in Boston. Aditya’s doctoral research focuses on the politics of access to land and housing among urbanizing and economically precarious populations in small towns in India. Aditya is interested more broadly in issues of informal work, migration and urbanization.