Research

With its close ties to the Oxford Future of Cooling Programme led by Dr Radhika Khosla, the work includes landscape assessments of active and passive cooling technologies; social construction of cooling behaviours, and more.

OICSD’s work on healthcare is growing steadily. Program Director Dr Siddharth Arora’s work on using smartphones for the remote detection and monitoring of Parkinson’s disease has gained traction – the smartphone app has been translated into 13 languages and is being used in an NIHR funded Exenatide drug study. His recent study  proposes a sensitive outcome measure to quantify subtle motor changes in Parkinson’s disease and can be used in neuroprotective trials to predict clinical outcomes. He recently discussed this at the Digital Biomarkers & Digital Measurements EU Summit 2022. His dream is for this smartphone technology to be used in a diagnostic support tool for patients and care providers. In addition, Dr Arora presented his research on modelling the risk of emergency admission to the hospital during the pandemic at the MSOM 2022, and probabilistic forecasting of the length of stay at an emergency department at the International Symposium on Forecasting 2022.

Indian cities are made up of dense networks which often resist being streamlined and neatly organised through various modes of governance and master planning. In the light of this, recent literature on cities in the Global South has attempted to move beyond singular representations of urbanisation and recognise the multiple, emergent and improvised relations between people, infrastructures, capital and the environment. With respect to these complexities, how can we reimagine the concept of sustainability that is sensitive to social and spatial vulnerabilities in the city? Through its seminars and workshops, the OICSD works towards unpacking this question through an interdisciplinary lens.

Thinking Through Toxicity series
With an unprecedented rise in air pollution, environmental degradation and ever-widening socioeconomic disparity, everyday life in South Asia involves living within and amidst toxicity. But does ‘toxicity’ only mean contamination? Is it always visible? In this seminar series, we attempted to unpack the multiple meanings and complex logics of toxicity, tracing its different material and structural forms through an interdisciplinary lens:

Dust and Smoke: Air Pollution and Colonial Urbanism in India
Prof A Sharan, Director of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, discussed the history of smoke as a nuisance in Indian cities, particularly in colonial Calcutta and Bombay. Towards this, he examined the varied sources of energy used for domestic and industrial purposes, the persistence of old trades, the organisation of industrial production, labouring practices, and urban development projects which produced new sites of work, habitats and commodities on the one hand, and smoke and dust on the other. Discussants were OICSD scholar Sumedha Chakravarthy and Vinita Govindarajan. Watch here.

Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India
How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? In this talk, Poulami Roychowdhury, Assistant Professor at McGill University, provided a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world’s largest democracy. Prof Akshay Mangla, Said Business School, and OICSD scholar Aradhana CV, DPhil candidate in Law, were discussants for the event. Watch here.

Women, Caste, Tribe and Urban Waste: The Physical and Social Toxicity of Shit-Work
Waste has arguably become the fastest growing sector of the Indian economy with no end to this growth in sight for the next century. How is this waste economy regulated? How is waste work gendered? Prof Barbara Harriss-White discussed the complicated waste generated by this town, the toxic work conditions, the work-force that is organised around it and the stigmatising/ ‘socially toxic’ social relations of waste generated and disposed of throughout the circuits of capital within the urban boundary.