In the final episode of season one of The Zanaan Wanaan Podcast, we discuss Sociology and Anthropology as an academic discipline in the context of Kashmir. The episode discusses the shift from the colonial origins of this discipline to indigenous knowledge production, incarceration and criminological discourses, research in social work, Kashmiri women’s scholarship and methodologies like participant observation, auto-ethnography, phenomenology and long term immersion in the field. For this episode we were joined by three brilliant researchers:
Mir Fatimah Kanth is pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a Master’s in International Politics from SOAS, UK, supported through the Commonwealth Scholarship. Previously, she worked as a researcher at a civil liberties and human rights organisation in Srinagar.
Janees Lanker has done her Bachelors and Masters in Anthropology at University of Delhi. She is also a theatre practitioner and facilitator with a Delhi-based feminist, leftist theatre group, ‘Pandies’. Presently she is based in Srinagar where is trying to base her anthropological training within the scope of ethnographic research in Kashmir.
Roonaq un Nisa is a PhD Scholar at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research is focussed on the experiences of families of women prisoners in Kashmir, highlighting gendered consequences of imprisonment. For her M.Phil. research, she explored the far-reaching effects of imprisonment and the intersectionality between criminal justice system and families to broaden the scope for criminal justice in social work.