Roma Chatterji
Roma Chatterji retired as Professor of Sociology from Delhi University and is currently visiting professor at Shiv Nadar University. Apart from her abiding interest in folklore and folk culture, she has also worked on collective violence and illness narratives and has published extensively on all these subjects. Her current work is on picture storytelling, and she has explored several such forms ranging from the traditional arts of Bengal and Madhya Pradesh to popular superhero comics.
Her major publications include the following: Writing Identities: Folklore and the Performing Arts of Purulia (2009); Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Imagination in India (2012, 2016) and Graphic Narratives and the Mythological Imagination in India (2020). In addition, her coauthored and coedited works (with Deepak Mehta) include Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007) and Riot Discourses (2007). She is also the editor of Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (2015).
She will be with Colombo Institute between March to May 2025.
Pooja Kalita
Pooja Kalita is trained as a sociologist and has a PhD in sociology from South Asian University, New Delhi. At present, she is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Central European University Democracy Institute’s ‘Democracy and Development Forum,’ and is currently affiliated to its South Asia Hub at Social Scientists’ Association in Colombo. She is also a visiting fellow with the Colombo Institute.
She was a fellow with the project, ‘Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia’, funded by Riksbankens Jubilieumsfond (Sweden). Her core research areas are, Gender Studies, Sociology of Food, Heritage Studies and Visuality in Social Sciences. Her work has been published in various edited volumes, peer-reviewed journals, online portals etc. A recipient of ‘The 2020 ZubaanSasakawa Peace Foundation Grants for Young Researchers from The Northeast’, she often weaves in her passion for story-telling, photography and short film making with her research interests for wider dissemination.
Aruna P Jayasena
Aruna Jayasena is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. He is currently writing his dissertation after completing his MPhil degree in 2022. He received his MA degree in Political Science with a focus on Democracy, Conflict and Governance Studies (DECAGS) in 2015 from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and received the NOMA fellowship (2010) funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Corporation (Norad) to study politics attached to the Department of Political Science in University of Oslo, Norway for a semester. He obtained his BA (Hons) in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi in 2003.
Jayasena started his career in Sri Lanka’s non-government sector with the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (2003-2009) as a project manager and has worked across the country attached to various assignments such as Peace Building, Democracy, Good Governance and Coexistence, Post-Tsunami Rehabilitation, Child Protection and Education, and Community Health Development. He later joined the advertising industry (2011 -2014) and worked on TV commercials, video documentaries, and films. In 2014, he became the Project Officer of ‘Act4: Theatre for Change’, a non-profit organization that uses theatre and arts for social development and has engaged in various projects in the fields of youth empowerment and training, post-conflict rehabilitation, gender-based violence, child protection, promotion of fundamental and human rights through various interventions into disadvantaged and marginalized communities in Sri Lanka.
He also developed a career as a theatre stage manager in Sri Lankan theatre and has worked with several local theatre companies and groups since 2003. He received the award for the Best Stage Manager in the State Theatre Festival for “බර්නාඩා ගේ සිපිරි ගෙය” (The House of Bernarda Alba) in 2012, directed by Priyantha Sirikumara and “සාදය මාරයි සල්ලි හමාරයි” (Funny Money) in 2015, directed by Dharmapriya Dias. He has worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Stage Management and Theatre Administration at the Sri Palee Campus, University of Colombo since 2012 and the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Peradeniya since 2018.
In addition, Jayasena is a Freelance Graphic Designer and Documentary Film Maker. He has designed many book-covers for academic and non-academic publications and has produced several documentary films.