The British Council has chosen two Indian scholars, Camellia Biswas and Ajmal S. Rasaq as recipents of EARTH scholarships, which will enable them to work at Scottish universities.
Biswas is a PhD student in Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar. With the scholarship, she will visit and collaborate with the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) to investigate the ecological-cultural evolution of human-seal relationships in the Northern Scottish Islands across places and time to appreciate climate emergency and conservation response.
“Camellia aims to use technical software and concepts from zooarchaeology, cultural studies and political ecology to create a storytelling digital arena where secondary and primary data from fieldwork will be analyzed and exhibited digitally,” the official release says.
Biswas is an Inlaks-RS conservation Grant awardee, a Research Associate for Global Research Network (UK) and a British Council’s Women Leadership Fellow in 2022. She has been published in several popular media forums, magazines, and academic journals.
Rasaq is a fifth-year doctoral student at the IIT Guwahati Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Through the scholarship, he will shift his base of operations to the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, where he will investigate how the changing climate has altered the interactions between landowners and agricultural workforce in the paddy fields of Chellanam, a coastal neighbourhood of Cochin, Kerala.
“The project also looks to analyze how monsoon uncertainties exacerbate the socio-economic vulnerabilities of Pulayas, the village’s most politically, culturally, and economically marginalized caste, and in what new ways their resistance is organized”, the release stated. Rasaq was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by the University Grants Commission for pursuing his postgraduate research degree.
The British Council Scotland and the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities jointly sponsor Earth Scholarships. These awards are intended to inspire increased action against the climate problem, promote international and interdisciplinary partnerships with an emphasis on environmental sustainability topics, and support the contributions of the arts and humanities.
