Category: Newsletters

Highlights: ICoM data release, External engagements, media articles, new positions and vacancies

The Second Annual Conference on Empirical and Computational Social Sciences in India was held between December 15-17, 2019 at Ashoka University. Participants included Aditi Shah (Ashoka University), Basim U Nissa (Ashoka University), Brian Min (University of Michigan), Debayan Ghosh (Ashoka University), Deepak Malghan (Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore), Emily Russell (University of Michigan), Gaurika Kumar (Ashoka University), Gilles Verniers (Ashoka University), Huzaafa (Ashoka University), Ishika Sharan (Ashoka University), Kesar Majethia (Ashoka University), Naveen Bharathi (Harvard University), Rasika Gopalakrishnan (Ashoka University), and Sadam Hussain (Ashoka University).

TCPD hosted Peter Wolf and Rashid Soljonov from The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). The members of both the teams shared their work with the focus being on databases, research analysis and building technical capacity. Ideas for building a partnership were discussed.

We are pleased to present the fourth annual activity report, for the year 2018-19. It contains a description of the activities conducted by the Centre and its members this past year, elements of information regarding the Centre’s structure and development as well as a description of the Centre’s priorities and plans for the coming year.

The 3rd Annual TCPD Summer School was held between June 30, 2019 and July 6, 2019. We had about 50 participants with the majority coming from outside Ashoka. We would like to thank all our instructors – Basim Nissa (Ashoka), Gilles Verniers (Ashoka), Mohit Kumar (Ashoka), Neelanjan Sircar (Ashoka), Naveen Bharati (joining Harvard as a post-doc), Priyamvada Trivedi (Ashoka), Saket Anand (IIIT Delhi), Saloni Bhogale (Ashoka), Venkatesh Rajamanickam (IIT Bombay) and Yusuf Sait (Ashoka) – for making the 2019 summer school a rich and memorable experience. We would also like to thank Dr. S. Y. Quraishi (Distinguished Fellow at TCPD) for his talk on the work of the Election Commission of India and engaging with the participants.

In collaboration with Sciences Po, TCPD organised two conference events in Paris on June 24-25, 2019. The first one was on Women in Indian Politics. This event was sponsored by Facebook. The second event was a part of the LIA SPINPER project and the theme was The 17th Indian General Elections: National and Regional Perspectives. This was supported by CNRS