New SUPRA Students November 2022
We are happy to announce that we have four new students joining us for our Virtual SUPRA Programme in November 2022! It is a pleasure to welcome:
Linas Tavaras, MA student at Vilnius University
I’m a student of Vilnius University in the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies a MA program of Modern Asia studies. I have my BA in South Asian studies from the same Institute.. For more than 3 years, I’ve been volunteering in Young Wave, an organization focusing on drugs harm reduction. There I got my first publication on drug checking services in Lithuania. Currently, I’m working on a new project thesis about legal opium farmers in India. Last year, I did an ethnographic fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh and gathered information from legal opium farmers. In my project, I’m going to analyze how the farmers narrated not only about the traditional processes of opium cultivation and the meaning their attribute to opium, but also about the problems which they face in their work, most of them relating to unclear or burdensome government’s policies on opium cultivation and the increasing attractiveness of the black market.
Ming Lu, PhD candidate at the University of Cologne
I am currently a doctoral student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the University of Cologne. Before coming to Germany, I obtained my master’s degree from the Department of Anthropology in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research interest covers moral anthropology, gender, family, and women’s issues in Asia, particularly on China. Now I am writing my doctoral thesis investigating the moral and emotional experiences of single professional women in contemporary Shanghai. Serving as an ethnography on the moralities and values of single women, my thesis advocates examining Chinese people’s moral experiences in close relation to their emotions by discovering the social and moral dimensions of emotions in the everyday lives.
Morgane Dussud, PhD candidate at SOAS
Morgane Dussud is a 4th year PhD candidate at the department of international politics at SOAS, working under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Hopgood and Dr Meera Sabaratnam. Her main interests are international human rights politics in both theory and practice. She works on issues related to social movements, transnational advocacy and democracy theories, with a regional interest on South East Asia. Her current doctoral research focuses on the politics of resistance in semi-authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on human rights mobilisation during the semi-democratic interlude in Myanmar in the period 2010-2021.
With a professional background with national and international NGOs, she is also interested in questions related to civic space and the transformation of the international development and humanitarian fields.
Nora Therese Witt, MA student at the Arctic University of Tromsø
Therese is currently enrolled in the MA Peace and Conflict Transformation program at the Arctic University of Tromsø, Norway. She holds a bachelor's degree in area studies with a focus on South Asia from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. During her bachelor, she spent a year abroad to study at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is currently on exchange again, taking classes and focusing on her research at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Driven by her interest in South Asian politics and her experience in journalism, she chose to focus her thesis on the media coverage in India and Pakistan of the Taliban takeover in 2021. Her interdisciplinary research analyses the influence of national security policies on the media discourses in English-language newspapers.