Contact Information:
Phone: +91- 731 - 2438957
Fax: +91 - 731 - 2438721
Email: nmishra[at]iiti.ac.in

Dr. Neeraj Mishra is employed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Indore, Madhya Pradesh in India since January 2013. Before joining IIT Indore, he was employed as 'post-doctoral researcher' in the department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, where he worked for about three years on the issues of urban water systems in Maharashtra, from April, 2010 till December, 2012.
Before coming to Amsterdam, he completed his PhD in Development Studies (Magna cum Laude) from the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany in February 2010 as a DAAD scholar.
As a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam, he was part of the project studying the scope and limitations of embedding spatial information tools in urban governance networks of recently urbanizing Indian cities. This research delved deeper into the urban question provided a gestalt to study the dynamics of knowledge politics in the governance of urban water resource published as a paper in the 'Environment and Urbanization-Asia' journal.
Due to growing urbanization in India in the coming decades more and more people would shift to the cities, new social questions would emerge and need to be discussed in the public sphere. The project shared its findings with the municipal commissioners of the three selected cities and has produced policy relevant publications. Along with this research, he was responsible for teaching the course called 'Introduction to Development Studies’.
Anthropology of development and aid in the water sector was also the area of research for the PhD. This thesis, called- 'a watershed in watershed governance: democracy and depoliticization of development in India' studied two internationally funded watershed development projects in India, to observe that the transformation of institutions and discourses within which watershed development takes place, and argued that the governance of water in India has reached a 'watershed moment'. To study this transformation, the thesis operationalized the concept of depoliticization building on the works of Habermas and his idea of the structural transformation of the public sphere, and the works James Ferguson on Lesotho. This study explains how the everyday governance at the village and project level takes shape and the wider implications of this process in the field of natural resource management from the theoretical standpoint of depoliticization. It made recommendations for reducing water scarcity and its sustainable governance in the water scarce regions of India. The thesis was published as a book by SVH Press, Germany.

1. Mishra, N., Baud, I., Pfeffer, K., van Dijk, T., Richter, C., Bon, B., Sridharan, N., Pancholi, V., Saharan, T. 2013. The Development of Kalyan-Dombivli: Fringe City in Metropolitan Region. Chance2Sustain Project.European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI- Bonn, Germany).
2. Mishra, N. 2011.Unravelling Governance Networks in Development Projects- Depoliticization as an Analytical Framework.Environment and Urbanization ASIA. 2(2), 153-168.
3. Mishra, N. 2010. 'A Watershed in Watershed governance': Democracy and Depoliticization of development in India. SVH Press, Saarbruecken, Germany.
4. Mishra, N. 2008. Representation of the state in watershed development projects in India. The 23rd annual general body meeting and conference, March 12-14; Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Contact Information:
Phone: +91 732 4360 822
Fax: +91 - 731 - 2438721
Email: akshaya.kumar[at]iiti.ac.in

Dr. Akshaya Kumar received the Ph.D. degree in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, UK. He joined IIT Indore in December 2017 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is currently finishing a manuscript provisionally titled "Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in a Comparative Media Crucible", and his essays have appeared in Social Text, Television and New Media, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and various other journals.

1. (2018) ‘Deswa, the film and the movement: Taste, Industry and Representation in Bhojpuri Cinema.’ Contemporary South Asia, 26(1).
2. (2017) ‘Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties: The Formal Dwellings of Hindi Cinema.’ Social Text, 35 (3): 41-70.
3. (2017) ‘Item Number/Item Girl.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (2): 338-341.
4. (2016) ‘Bhojpuri Consolidations in the Hindi Territory: Infrastructure, Aesthetics and Competing Masculinities in North India.’ BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 7 (2): 189-206.
5. (2016) ‘Bhojpuri cinema and the "rearguard": Gendered leisure, gendered promises.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33(2): 151-175.
6. (2015) ‘The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India.’ Television and New Media 16(6): 538–556.
7. (2014) ‘Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37 (2): 239-254.
8. (2014) ‘The Aesthetics of Pirate Modernities: Bhojpuri Cinema and the Underclasses.’ In Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji (eds) Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World. Oxford: Berg, 185-203.
9. (2013) ‘Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex.’ South Asian Popular Culture 11 (1): 61-74.
10. (2012) ‘Landscape, Allegory, and Historical Trauma in Postwar Japanese Cinema: Recapitulating Existential Horror in Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964).’ Asian Cinema Journal 22 (2): 364- 380.