Associate fellows

Leanne Miranda

Leanne Miranda is currently the Institute’s Administrator and a PhD candidate in History at Victoria University of Wellington. Her doctoral thesis explores the history of Indian food within New Zealand’s food culture, using culinary practices as a lens to understand the intersections of migration, identity, and cultural exchange.

Rageshree Bhattacharyya

Rageshree Bhattacharyya is a PhD student at the School of Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington. Her doctoral research aims to study the growing techno-political developments in the domain of food and eating in India by specifically looking at rice fortification in the region.

Garima Bisht

Garima Bisht is a fourth-year PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Auckland researching the Sociocultural influence of Korean Popular Culture on the construction of neoliberal, aspirational Indian identity.

Shviti Tagore

Shviti Tagore a PhD student at the School of Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research project investigates how shame is articulated medically and socially for the first responders dealing with cases of sexual violence.

Yaneng Zhang

Yaneng Zhang is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland. Their doctoral research examines fusion music, genre, identity, and media representation in Indian popular music through a case study of the musical TV programme Coke Studio India (2011–2015).

Yarong Duan

Yarong Duan is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on statecrafting and destatecrafting through the lens of ethnic mobilization.

Swarnima Kriti

Swarnima Kriti is a PhD candidate at the Massey University School of People, Environment and Planning. Her doctoral research explores pathways from social harm to social healing in Indigenous contexts.

Ravinal Prakash

Ravinal Prakash is a PhD scholar at Massey University from Fiji who is of Indian descent, and whose work focuses on climate change adaptation, social capital, and livelihood diversification among rural Indo-Fijian farming communities in Fiji.

Dipayan Dutta

Dipayan Dutta is a PhD candidate at the School of Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington. His research explores environmental activism, ecological degradation, and urban transformation in Gurgaon, India, focusing on how different communities experience environmental change in unequal ways.