‘It Is Time to Find More Research Partners and Cooperation from Around the World’
Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Assistant Professor at the HSE School of Sociology, Moscow, has worked at HSE since 2017. In 2022, he was named one of the university’s best teachers by student vote. He has published several papers in internationally recognised journals and supervised a number of doctoral students. Below, Dr Chowdhury talks about his research career, the changes in the global academic environment, and the larger role of international scholarly cooperation.
Arnab Roy Chowdhury
Research History
I started working at HSE University in 2017. I was initially a postdoctoral fellow in the public policy department, and have been an assistant professor (tenure track) in the Sociology department since September 2018. In the past six years of working here, I have gathered immensely novel and valuable experience in teaching, research, reviewing papers and book proposals, writing, and as a member of MA and PhD thesis defence committees.
International cooperation in research, writing, and dissemination played a very crucial role in my academic journey
When I arrived at HSE, I was already embedded in an international academic network. Since finishing my PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2014, I have been participating in multiple independent small-fund research projects with Professor Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt from the Australian National University (ANU), mostly working on issues that are affecting artisanal and small-scale mining communities in India. At the same time, I started working with Professor Manjusha Nair, who was initially teaching at NUS and then later moved to George Mason University, USA, on a project that deals with large-scale coal mining and labour issues in Central India.
In the meantime, I also completed multiple small projects on labour migration with Professor Habibul Haque Khondker from Zayed University, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and projects on environmental ethics with Professor Prasenjit Duara (initially at NUS and now at Duke University, USA); both of them have been extremely kind, and central guiding forces in my academic life.
Honing One’s Skills
These projects contributed immensely to my learning curve; I read voraciously, learned new theories and approaches, reviewed research projects, wrote research proposals, participated in international conferences and workshops, travelled and did fieldwork independently as well as with these scholars. I took active part in formal and informal discussions and debates with them and others that enriched my knowledge, logic, rationale, structured thought processes, and argumentative capacity. Through this, I also developed the art of public speaking and lecturing.
These international exposures imbued me with a sense of cosmopolitan and global research norms, ethics, and academic practices
It instilled in me a determination and persistence for doing good research, understanding that it takes time to conceive and start a project, and leading it to completion. Eventually, publishing newspaper outreach and journal papers from that research also takes a lot of patience and hard work, but the end result is almost always exhilarating.
Over the years, from participating in these projects, I learned the art of engaging with disciplined, structured, and focused academic writing. Through hard work, I realised that the completion of a PhD degree is just the entry point into an academic career. During my PhD at NUS, I grappled and tried hard to learn new things as a novice. Thanks to my supervisors, Professor Daniel Goh and Professor Anne Raffin, from whom I got outstanding and remarkable guidance and support to transform my nascent ideas into new concepts, as a result I was able to defend my thesis successfully. However, the struggle to get a new job, remain academically relevant, and do meaningful and impactful research and teaching actually started after the completion of the PhD. International cooperation and support, as well as a job at the reputed Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM-C), helped keep me afloat during these times.
Ongoing Work
After I joined HSE University in 2017, thankfully, the fruition of these academic projects—for which I had been waiting eagerly over the years—came in the form of publications, which are extremely crucial for academic recognition and growth.
Since coming to HSE University, I have successfully published three papers, (all in Scopus Q1 journals), one book or report from the World Bank, and one book chapter through my ANU research collaborations
My ANU collaborations eventually led to another collaboration with Dr Lynda Lawson, a senior fellow with the University of Queensland, Australia, with whom I published another paper on ASM mining in Thailand in a Scopus Q1 journal. Now, the Thailand project is taking shape and will be developed into a full-fledged project in the next few years.
I have also collaborated with Dr Ahmed Abid, then at Western Sydney University, Australia (and now teaching at the University of Liberal Arts (ULAB) in Bangladesh), on two projects: on Rohingya refugee issues and on Social Movements in Bangladesh. We published a paper in a Scopus Q2 journal and a book chapter, and another paper is under review in a Scopus Q1 journal. I am also academically cooperating with him and Professor Sreedeep Bhattacharya (Associate Professor, Shiv Nadar University, India) for my ASM in Thailand project, and the three of us completed a fieldwork trip together in Thailand in 2016. I have also been cooperating with Dr Priyanshu Gupta, Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM-L), India, with whom I have already published a paper on the forest access rights of the indigenous people in India, and another on connected issues is under review, both in Scopus Q2 journals.
Maintaining Academic Mobility
Through all these years, this journey of international academic cooperation has been one of learning, nurturing, mutual cooperation, and friendship, which has shaped me as a scholar in various ways. In the last six years, I have travelled to Taiwan once and Germany twice for conferences, Australia once for a research trip, and Bangladesh and India for fieldwork multiple times.
The pandemic slowed down all international travel, but cooperation continued online with new innovative approaches. I attended several conferences and seminars in Germany, Vietnam, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and India, all online
In 2019, I participated in an international conference at Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam, that was organised by world-renowned cultural studies expert professor John Hutnyk; subsequently, in 2021, I delivered a keynote address at the second conference that was organised there.
Collaborating with Students
At HSE, I have already supervised the PhD thesis of Md. Reza Habib (from Bangladesh); he is going to defend his thesis on Rohingya refugee issues in Bangladesh soon this year. At present, I am supervising three more PhD students. Saikot Chandra Ghosh (from Bangladesh) is working on social movements in Bangladesh, and Timur Slavgorodsky-Kazanets (from Russia) is working on the virtual ethnography of online games. Both of them are in their second year of studies. I have another student in the first year, Petar Kovacevic (from Serbia), who is working on the governance of human-AI agent collectives.
From 2022 onward, I have increasingly started publishing with my PhD and MA students, especially with those who are writing excellent theses, thus helping them to get academic recognition
I am immensely grateful to HSE for enabling me to do all these research activities in the last six years and carry on my research successfully.
However, since the beginning of 2022, some of this cooperation has slowed down a bit due to geopolitical issues. My research-related travels have gone down drastically, partly for this reason and mainly due to some long-running health issues. Thankfully, I have recovered slowly and steadily.
Expanding Cooperation
Some of the research cooperation that I established still continues, and I have been writing papers, editing journal issues, and publishing with great enthusiasm. As the geopolitical reality of the world is changing rapidly, I think it is also high time we find more research partners and cooperation from throughout the world, particularly from China, South Asia, Latin America, and African countries. Some of the universities functioning in these countries have great academic legacies, particularly in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, development studies, and postcolonial studies, and have novel theories and outlooks to offer. These are also some of the research themes and areas that I work on.
I look forward to extending academic cooperation with scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the near future
These mutual academic relations and research on a transnational scale would help us learn more about each other and would hopefully contribute to shaping a world that thrives on sharing, caring, giving, tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity, equality, respectfulness, eudemonia, and kindness for each other.