Adhikari said she appreciates Brown's incredible community of deeply engaged scholars who bring passion and commitment to their academic projects, who share their work and bring others into conversations. "My involvement on campus [as a teaching assistant and a Graduate Student Representative for the Department of Sociology and a Graduate Student Liaison for Saxena] was a natural extension of the work I was doing before I returned to academia," said Adhikari. "That's what public engagement on critical questions of democracy, civil society and inequality need to be."
She expressed gratitude that Brown offered her the space and freedom to organize conversations across programs, communities and disciplines. While at Brown, Adhikari scheduled film screenings and a one-day conference on Indian democracy. She also organized campus-wide participation in a global standout for peace and de-escalation of the threat of war in South Asia in 2019, teach-ins to educate students on the suppression of academic freedoms in public universities in India, and debates on academic freedom in the United States. "[Graduate Program in Development] initiatives," she said, "built bridges and allowed us to think and organize and ask questions as scholars in training within and beyond Brown. They were some of the watershed moments I experienced at Brown."
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan's Center for Emerging Democracies, Adhikari persuaded her colleagues to adopt the GPD's "Back from the Field" initiative, which gives doctoral students seven minutes to briefly depict their field research. "The presentation distills your field research. It's a great way to get early feedback before you get started on your research," said Adhikari, who found the experience quite helpful, as was the financial support from the GPD that allowed her to spend a great deal of time in the field. "Faculty advised me: Get to the field as fast as you can and spend as much time there as you can."
Her book project, "Redeeming Rights and Democratization of the Local State in India," evaluates accountability reforms that are meant to create opportunities and platforms for ordinary citizens to claim social rights and examines the role of the law in instituting democratic participation, deliberation, transparency and reform, particularly in contexts of extreme caste, gender and class inequalities and high levels of disenchantment with the state.
When COVID hit India three months into her field research for the book, she had to halt that research. Adhikari then got involved in relief work in Delhi to address the crisis facing migrant workers who fled the cities for their villages, as they had neither sufficient food nor money to survive in the cities. "I got involved in organizing a large volunteer network providing micro cash transfers and, through my training as a social scientist, I wrote up information about what we were doing," said Adhikari. "That evidence became part of petitions filed with India's Supreme Court to explain the current crisis and recommend appropriate government action to address the crisis."
Even as she had to defer her doctoral field research during COVID, Adhikari noted that faculty and colleagues at Brown kept in touch with her, and she shared the work she was doing in India. "The University didn't forget me," she recalled.
"Leading scholars come to our small community, and we can engage with them at receptions and one-on-one meetings and discuss our work with them," she said. "Some of those conversations were very helpful in nudging my research in a different direction, and the opportunity to engage with leading scholars and do research in the social sciences in these interactive settings gives students at Brown incredible exposure through their graduate careers."
In mid-summer 2024, Adhikari was offered an assistant professor position at the National Law School (NLS) in Bangalore, India, where she will teach undergraduate law students and public policy graduate students. As she always intended to return to her native India and continue her research, teaching and public action on accountability and governance, she is delighted to have the opportunity to do so at a public institution like NLS, even before completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.