Ms. Shanti George

Shanti George graduated from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, with an MPhil in 1978 and returned there as a Teacher Fellow (1982-83), a Reader on the Faculty (1986-88) and a Visiting Fellow (2012). Her formative experiences at ‘D School’ bridged academic learning, professional orientation and exposure to the distinctive social anthropology that had emerged in independent India to span the subcontinent and its regions.

This orientation provided her with professional and human awareness to draw on subsequently, when teaching at the University of Zimbabwe and carrying out a village study that was informed by related work she had done in India, generating a comparative study of the dynamics of cooperative dairy development in India and Zimbabwe.

Her training at the Department was also a major influence on her exploring the life narratives of development professionals in seven countries on three continents who had reinterpreted within their own contexts what they had learnt at one school of development studies in Europe — leading to her further work that advocated cosmopolitan pedagogies for global citizen professionals, whether scholar activists or researchers or practitioners.

Finally, her DSE experience came handy in using parenthood as a moment for participant observation of childhood and adolescence in a European context — juxtaposed with lived experience of growing up in India — to imbue comparative research towards positive social change for children within communities in Southern Africa, West Asia, North Africa and currently Europe.

Shanti’s six books and many articles draw on her formative education at ‘D School’, as does her present work for the Learning for Well-being Foundation in the Netherlands and beyond.

She is being felicitated by the Delhi School of Economics on its Annual Day Event in 2022.