Carol Breckenridge

Founder

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

Carol Breckenridge 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.

Carol Appadurai Breckenridge (1942 - 4 October 2009) was an American historian of South Asia. With the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai she founded the journal Public Culture in 1988 and, in Mumbai in 2001, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), an independent research collective that works on urban life and youth-led research in the city. PUKAR describes her as its founding patron.

Early life and education

Breckenridge was born in 1942. She took a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975 with a dissertation on the Sri Minakshi Sundareswarar temple at Madurai.

Career

She held academic posts at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Yale University and the New School for Social Research in New York, where she retired in 2008. Her research covered colonialism and the political economy of ritual, state and religion in south India, society and aesthetics in India since 1850, and cosmopolitan cultural forms; she also wrote on Art Deco architecture in Mumbai and on urban water.

In 1988 she co-founded Public Culture, which became an influential forum for transnational and cultural studies and which under her editorship carried photo essays and the work of young artists. She stepped down as editor in 2000 and in 2006 established the Sister Cities Project, linking scholars in the United States with intellectuals in Africa and Asia.

In 2001 she and Appadurai founded PUKAR in Mumbai. PUKAR records that she helped sharpen its mission and guided its projects and leadership until her death. She died in New York on 4 October 2009.[2][3][4][5]

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: