Two PhD students from Lund University have been awarded the SASNET Travel Grant for conducting field studies in India. Sahana Subramanian will be studying the political ecology and economy of glacierised environments in Ladakh. Fainaz Inamdeen will visit Kolkata to research the impacts of extreme river flows on bridges.
Every year, SASNET invites Lund University doctoral students to apply for a travel grant to do field research in South Asia. To be eligable, the doctoral projects should focus either on South Asia as a region or one of its states (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The purpose of travel can for instance be fieldwork, archive visits, or conference participation.
The 2024 SASNET PhD Travel Grant will be awarded to two Lund University doctoral students; Sahana Subramanian (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies) and Fainaz Inamdeen (Division of Water Resouces Engineering).
Sahana Subramanian is a first-year doctoral student in the interdisciplinary NaturICE project at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS). The project combines biodiversity studies with climate science and studies how diverse facets of human-glacier relationships, such as economy, energy, culture, and spirituality, are affected due to climate change and the ensuing glacier retreat.
For this purpose, Sahana Subramanian will be studying the political ecology and economy of glacierised environments in Ladakh, India. One of her research questions delves into understanding how glaciers in Ladakh are politicised and are spaces of contention. She wants to investigate how Ladakh’s glacierised environments are being used or (misused) for public and private gains, as well as the implications for local communities’ livelihoods and land use.
Fainaz Inamdeen is a doctoral student at the Water Resources Engineering Division at Lund University. His research project focuses on the impacts of extreme river flows on bridges, with a special focus on local scour. Riverbed scouring is an emerging problem around the world associated with higher, more frequent river discharges over short periods of time. With climate change, scour-prone events are predicted to become even more common.
Using the SASNET PhD Travel Grant, Fainaz Inamdeen will travel to Kolkata in India to conduct hydraulic flume studies, collect field data and to collaborate with experts at the Fluvial Hydraulics Laboratory of the School of Water Resources Engineering. He will produce a comprehensive evaluation of riverbed erosion downstream of bridge foundation through a combination of field measurements and laboratory experiments.
