Alpa Shah is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (2010). She is the editor of Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal (2012) with Judith Pettigrew. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic field research in central and eastern India, she has also written numerous articles on corruption, development, the state, labour migration, the Maoist movement and indigenous rights. She has also made documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service on her research. She is the Lead Investigator of the British Academy UK-South Asia Partnership Project on ‘Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia: Current Experiences and Future Agendas in India and Nepal’. She is also a member of the British Academy partnership out of which this conference has grown.
