Desi Academia Podcast

Aman tells us about how he combined his passion for sport with his lived experience in India, and professional experience as a sports journalist. We discuss how he moved from the fast-paced life of journalistic publication, to slow and measured academic knowledge creation. We also talk about the nuances of researching and teaching about sports journalism and disability, and how to cover a para sportsperson on their term.

Aman also shares with us the amazing experience of his field work: covering and publishing on the Paris para-olympics.

Dr. Prakash is an assistant professor at GITAM University, and his research interests include ecology and animal behavior. Join us in this fun conversation, where we take a deep dive into his academic journey and his motivations. We tackle questions like why the study of ecology is essential, his research involving studying bats in the wild ecosystems of India, and much more.

https://www.sciencealert.com/incredible-experiment-reveals-a-way-to-make-skin-transparent

In this episode, we discuss the resurgence of He Jiankui on the Twitter trends, the research that made CRISPR a Nobel-worthy discovery, and the various reasons why scientists don't go around gene-editing human embryos to create super species.

Readings:

Join us in this episode of Desi Academia Podcast where we discuss the ins and out of an academic publication. Megh and Vatsal are joined by the friend of the pod Dr. Rituparna Patgiri where they talk about all the basics of an academic publication.

We tackle questions like what is an academic publication, where do we publish, who is an author, what is peer review and more!

Recommendations

Megh

“What’s app got to do with it? Premium love in times of emotional capitalism”

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2024/08/12/whats-app-got-to-do-with-it-premium-love-in-times-of-emotional-capitalism/

Grey Zone: How to swear like a linguist

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28035108?seq=165

“Exploring dialogic interactions in grandparent-grandchild conversations over video chat in the United States” https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZSQM4M84CUIXZZ7IW4FN/full?target=10.1080/17482798.2024.2384977

Movie: Close to You

Rituparna

Doing Sociology- Rituparna’s article on publishing in sociology

Research assistant wanted: The outsourcing of intellectual labour reveals academia’s colonial roots https://scroll.in/article/1061526/research-assistant-wanted-the-outsourcing-of-intellectual-labour-reveals-academias-colonial-roots

LSE How publishing has changed over time

Nature- removing journal names from CVs https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02596-y

Vatsal

Eric, Netflix

City of Djins

The gang returns to discuss what makes academics divorce their intellect and rationality from their political positions?

Recommendations:

In this episode Palomi, shares her journey in psychology. She discusses her experiences with fieldwork and in clinical settings in Karnataka, Andhra, Florida, and the East Coast.

We talk about how researchers of the human mind manage human subject data, building a portfolio and online presence for pursuing research opportunities, and the impact of social media, science communication, and AI tools on the academic community.  

Recommendations:

In this episode of DAP, we discuss the national entrance exam controversy, which impacts millions of students and academics in the country. Apart from NEET/NET exams, we discuss our first impressions of the controversy, what it means to the students, the general examination and coaching culture surrounding it, and the ramifications of this absolute blunder, amongst many other things.

Recommendations

We are joined by Ravi and Tara, two incredible alumni of a private university in India. They talk to us about their experience ideating, researching and writing their undergraduate theses, and how their pre-doctoral work in India sparked their ongoing research journeys in the fields of economics and culture studies.

Recommendations

In this conversation, Megh and Kaushtubh talk to content creator Balram Vishwakarma about his qualitative research work documenting the lived realities of Mumbai's workers. He shares the story of why he co-founded Scroll Back Studios, and how he approaches sharing human interest stories with the realities of content monetisation.

Recommendations:

DAP "Supplementary Materials" is a new subset of conversations that just can't be fit anywhere else.

In this quick episode, Megh and Ajay discuss the recent global outage faced by Windows users, the issue faced by Crowdstrike, and the difficulty of balancing the need for immediate actions with the need to rigorously testing a release before deployment.

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