Arjun Appadurai

Founder

Founder of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research)

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Arjun Appadurai is the founder of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, human rights and healthcare from Mumbai.

Arjun Appadurai (born 4 February 1949) is an Indian-American anthropologist known for his work on globalisation, modernity and urban life. He is professor emeritus of media, culture and communication at New York University's Steinhardt School.

In Mumbai he founded PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), a non-profit that promotes what it calls the right to research by training residents of the city's poorer neighbourhoods as community researchers.

Early life and education

Appadurai was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) into a Tamil family. He attended St Xavier's High School, Fort, and took an Intermediate Arts degree at Elphinstone College in the city. He graduated with a BA from Brandeis University in 1970, and took an MA in 1973 and a PhD in 1976 from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Career

Appadurai has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, where he was also dean of the humanities, and Yale University, where he directed the Center on Cities and Globalization. He was provost and senior vice-president for academic affairs at The New School from 2004 to 2006, and held the Goddard Professorship in media, culture and communication at New York University from 2008 to 2021. Since 2021 he has been Max Weber Global Professor at the Bard Graduate Center, based in Berlin.

His books include Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), the edited volume The Social Life of Things (1986), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), Fear of Small Numbers (2006), The Future as Cultural Fact (2013) and Banking on Words (2016). He co-founded the journal Public Culture.

Appadurai is the founding trustee of PUKAR, and is now an adviser to it. The organisation, based in Mumbai, works on community-based participatory research with young people in urban and rural settings, and describes its Barefoot Researchers as its central initiative. The historian Carol Breckenridge (1942-2009) is named by PUKAR as its founding patron and a major contributor to its establishment.

Recognition

Appadurai was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He received an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2013, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Open Society Institute. He served on the social sciences jury of the Infosys Prize in 2010 and 2017.[2][3][4]

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research)

PUKAR, Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research, is an independent research collective and urban knowledge institution based in Mumbai. It conducts multi-sectoral, cross-disciplinary, community-based participatory action research on questions of urbanisation and globalisation, training young people from the city's neighbourhoods as 'barefoot researchers'. Its programmes span youth and urban knowledge production, urbanism and the demand for distributive justice and good governance, and the Healthy Cities Wealthy Cities work on health-seeking behaviour.

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research) reports the following, on its own site: