Dr. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay is an Associate Professor of Sociology at FLAME University, Pune. She received an AM and a Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus on medical anthropology, demography, and South Asian studies from Brown University. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Her research over the last sixteen years has been attentive to questions of inequalities - both gender inequities as well as intersectional inequities that shape life trajectories including its deleterious impacts on health, education, and life chances. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Vera Campbell Foundation as well as more recently by the World Health Organisation. Her research has been published in several international and national journals and has also been covered by the national press in India, as well as internationally by the BBC. She has worked for the government, academia, and non-profits in India, the US, and Europe. Her first book The Gravity of Hope makes explicit the links between domestic and structural violence and will be published in 2022. 

Bhargavi S. Rao works at the intersections of community action with law, policy, planning and governance. She currently works as Deputy Director, Center for Financial Accountability, focussing on Energy & Infrastructure Finance and Capacity Building. She has 25 years of experience across research, advocacy, campaign and teaching on a variety of human rights, governance and people-centred efforts in areas of environmental and social justice. She has worked with the Public Health Foundation India, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, Environment Support Group (ESG), United Way, Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She was Co-Director, International Honours Programme, (Boston University and SIT World Learning) & Minnesota Studies in International Development, the University of Minnesota implementing experiential educational programmes. She has taught on a variety of faculty-led programmes at the University of Washington, Seattle, Acara College, Minnesota and a few others. She enjoys engaging with student communities, developing and designing research tools, working with local communities and co-creating new ideas to address environmental and social justice challenges. With her multidisciplinary background, she pursues her interdisciplinary approach to research in environmental decision-making processes, agroecology, biodiversity, renewable energy, infrastructure, public health, climate change, cities and local governance. She writes regularly in leading dailies and has contributed research papers in science journals, chapters to books and articles in magazines.