Where are the Indigenous Scholars in Indian Academia? Who writes and speaks about the indigenous people of India?

Ashok Danavath is a postgraduate Indigenous scholar from Telangana. Having graduated as a National Overseas Scholarship fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, he is currently working as a Research Associate for the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). As a scholar, activist, and writer, Ashok's work addresses multiple and overlapping questions, such as decolonial scholarship and Indigenous knowledge production, inequities in educational access, expanding a global lens in thinking about Indigeneity, first-generation Dalit (caste-oppressed) and Adivasi knowledge production, and broader social justice issues within higher education such as retention and empowerment of caste-oppressed scholars within academia.

In this talk, Ashok will illuminate what it means to think and write at the intersections of human rights, rural welfare, Indigenous policies, casteism and education, social justice, public policy of marginalized communities, and higher education of Adivasi (Indigenous) and Dalit (caste-oppressed) communities In India and abroad.

This event will be moderated by Manmit Singh, Master's student in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.