Vibha Arora

Biography

Vibha Arora is currently serving as an Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi where she has been working since 2006. She has also taught at the University of Delhi (2005-06) after completing her doctoral research as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Oxford (2000-2004) and also worked in the international development sector. She has received prestigious scholarships and fellowships such at the national and international level such as the Commonwealth Scholarship, MSH (Paris), Fellowship at IIAS Shimla, Al-Sagar Outstanding Young Faculty Fellowship (IIT Delhi), and the M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize of the Indian Sociological Society. Vibha’s teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of Environmental Sociology, Identity and Indigenous groups, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Dams, Hydropower and Development Politics, Sociology of Religion, Migration, Research Methods and Visual Anthropology. Ethnographically, Vibha has expertise in Sociology of India and in Himalayan studies (including Tibetan Diaspora settled here) and widely published on the same. Based on her doctoral and post-doctoral research in Sikkim, Vibha is currently finalizing a monograph entitled Sacred Sikkim for publication. She has co-edited three journal issues on ‘Ecocriticism’ (Reconstruction, 2007, 7.1), Development of Democratic Routes in the Himalayan ‘Borderlands’ (Sociological Bulletin, 2009, 58.1) and ‘Fieldwork and Interdisciplinary Research’ (Reconstruction, 2009, 9.1). She is co-editor of Routeing Democracy in the Himalayas (Routledge, 2013) and Democratization in the Himalayas (Routledge, 2017). She has to her credit more than 35 articles published in eminent journals, and in various edited volumes.

Research Interest

• Sociology of Marginalized Groups • Sociology of Religion [Indigenous religion, Hinduism and Buddhism]