Dr. Annapurna Devi Pandey
Faculty of Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Pandey holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was a Post- doctoral fellow in Social Anthropology at Cambridge. Her research interests are women’s activism and leadership in the context of State and Multi-National Corporations, their economic and political empowerment in rural and tribal India; and women’s identity making in the Odia Diaspora in California. She is the author of numerous essays on Indian Women’s activism, agency, entrepreneurship and empowerment in India and Indian diaspora. Currently she is a senior Fulbright U.S. Scholar working in Odisha, India. Her research project focuses on the impact of skill training on everyday life of rural and tribal women in Odisha. She is an accomplished filmmaker (Homeland in the Heart; The Myth of Buddha’s Birthplace (with Prof. James Freeman) and Road to Zuni. She was President of the Orissa Society of the Americas (2011- 2013), the oldest socio-cultural organization of diasporic Odias in North America.
Dr. Brahmanand Mohanty
Brahmanand Mohanty is associated with the School of Environment, Resources and Development of the Asian Institute of Technology (Bangkok) since 1986 as a faculty member. Since 1991, he has also been serving the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) as its regional advisor for Asia. He has undertaken professional missions for bilateral and multilateral development agencies during the last three decades in some 25 countries, especially in Asia but also in the Middle East, Africa and the Mediterranean region.
He graduated from the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India) in 1979 and obtained his doctorate in energy from the Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse, France) in 1985.
