Parag Jyoti Saikia is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies the construction of a hydropower dam to understand how infrastructures in-the-making shape everyday life, environment, and geopolitics in a frontier region of India. He is currently a SAPIENS Public Scholar Training Fellow (2023-2024) with SAPIENS magazine. His dissertation research was supported by Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from University North Carolina’s Graduate School. Parag has been associated with activist organizations working on dams, rivers, and environment in India for almost a decade. These experiences along with his belonging to the area he works on for his doctoral research, has made him committed to engaged public scholarship. Parag has written several articles, op-eds, and blogs about dams, rivers, politics, and citizenship both in English and Assamese, his mother tongue.
India’s new mega-dam will roil lives downstream with wild swings in water flow every day
Sep 06, 2024 07:29 am UTC| Nature
Hey Rupam, open the door. Take this fish, a woman yelled from outside. I was sitting in the kitchen at my friend Rupams house in rural northeast India. It was the heart of monsoon season, and rain had been falling since...
South African telescope discovers a giant galaxy that’s 32 times bigger than Earth’s