JURY > 2010 > Social Sciences

2010 Social Sciences Jury

Jury Chair

Prof. Amartya Sen

Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, USA
He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His other awards include the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honor awarded by the President of India; the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics; the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award; the Edinburgh Medal; the Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Grã-Cruz); the Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal; the Eisenhower Medal; Honorary Companion of Honour (U.K.), and the George C. Marshall Award.

Jurors

Prof. Arjun Appadurai

Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, Steinhardt, New York University, USA
Prof. Appadurai’s current research focuses on ethnic violence in the context of globalization, a longer term collaborative project on the cultural dimensions of social crisis in Mumbai and a comparative ethnographic project on grass-roots globalization. He was the founding Director of the Chicago Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago. He has served on numerous international advisory bodies, including the advisory councils of the Smithsonian Institute, the Center for Arts and Culture (Washington), the Institute for Cultural Pluralism (Rio de Janeiro), the Research Center for Religion and Society (Amsterdam), Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, and the Social Science Research Council (New York). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as a consultant to a wide range of public and private organizations, including many major foundations (Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller), UNESCO, UNDP, WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research), the World Bank, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.

Prof. Alaka Basu

Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, U.S.A. and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Prof. Basu was the Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell University from 2002 to 2008. She has done field research on health and social demography in Bangladesh and India and has published extensively in the areas of social demography, gender and development, and South Asian Studies, in academic journals as well as the popular press. Her books include Culture, the Status of Women and Demographic Behavior (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1992), The Methods and Uses of Anthropological Demography (edited with P. Aaby, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and The Social and Political Context of Abortion: Global Perspectives (Edited, Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 2003). She has served on the Committees on Reproductive Health and on Population Projections of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. and on the expert committees of several UN panels. She has also been a member of the governing councils of the Population Association of America, The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and the Population Council in New York. She was the chairperson of IUSSP’s Scientific Committee on Anthropological Demography from 1992 to 1996. She is currently on the editorial boards of the journals Population and Development Review, and Asian Population Studies.

Prof. Dipankar Gupta

Prof. Gupta has been a Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University till July 2009. His work focuses on the structure of society and social change in India. He has received the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies for 2004. He has held visiting appointments in several overseas institutions such as those in the University of Toronto, London School of Economics, Science-Po in Paris and Lille, University of Strasbourg, and most recently in Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. He has written and edited 15 books, including his last work is titled, 'The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly?' He has been a co-editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology for over 15 years and has written for various popular journals and Indian dailies.

Prof. André Béteille

Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the University of Delhi and National Research Professor, New Delhi
Prof. Béteille’s main interest, as a sociologist, has been on social analysis rather than social policy. To the extent that he has written on policy, his effort has been directed to policy analysis rather than policy prescription. His interest in the contradiction between norms and practices led Professor Béteille to study in some detail the nature and operation of institutions. He has lectured in many universities, and his books and papers have been published both in India and abroad. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 2005 he was conferred the Padma Bhushan by the President of India. Professor Béteille has held a number of visiting academic appointments. He was Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester, Commonwealth Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Edinburgh. His published work covers a wide range of topics from political sociology to the sociology of religion.

Prof. Nur Yalman

Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, USA
Professor Yalman's special interests include contemporary social theory and theorists, the anthropology of religion with special reference to Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism; social and political conditions in South Asia and the Middle East; political and intellectual developments in other parts of Asia including Japan. He has received the Medal of Highest Honors from Soka University, Japan, in 1992 and an Honorary Doctorate, from Soka University in 1993. He has been a visiting professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris and at Cambridge, England. He is a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain, and of the Council on Foreign Relations of the USA. Professor Yalman is a member of the Board of Trustees of Koc University, and also of Robert College, both of Istanbul, Turkey, and other numerous institutions including the International Relations Forum of Turkey.