During her time at SCAS, Navnita Chadha Behera will work on the book project, “The ‘Subaltern-speak’: Vernacular Sites and Modes of Knowledge Production,” which addresses a fundamental disconnect between the key knowledge categories propounded by conflict and peace researchers and the lived realities of people experiencing those conflicts. Given the historical exclusions of global south scholars in theorizing peace research and, epistemic silencing of everyday practices of people by conventional tools of research, the ordinary people—the subalterns—occupy a doubly marginalised position. The project asks: can their vernacular registers of thinking, speaking and practicing existence, a la, the proverbial “subaltern-speak” serve as a legitimate site of knowledge production? Based on a self-reflexive and critical analysis of the author’s study of the protracted Kashmir conflict and her intermittent though continuing field research spanning over past three decades, the study explores how learning from the “subaltern-speak” can help re-work our social methods and show possible ways for engaging with the meta theoretical bases of peace research.

Navnita Chadha Behera will be a Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–26.

Paul Seaward is currently engaged on a long-term history of parliament in England/Britain/the United Kingdom which seeks to understand it through the history of ideas, society and institutions as well as the familiar political narratives. Connected with that project, he has been involved in a number of comparative initiatives, especially involving the history of the Polish sejm. At SCAS, Dr Seaward hopes to explore these connections and contrasts further through the histories and traditions of political assembly throughout Europe, from assemblies of estates in the early modern period through to the post-1789 development of democratic representative institutions. The project wants to draw out how these histories develop in dialogue with each other: how commentators observed and compared the experience of their neighbours and developed and adapted their own forms of political assembly to meet their own varying institutional and social contexts. At the centre of the project will be the transformation of political forms from a preponderant anxiety to achieve unity through consensus to a theory of parliamentarism as encompassing an acceptance of difference and dissensus and while securing change through majoritarian forms of decision-making. Underlying it is the question of whether majoritarianism is now driving the decline of the parliamentary idea and the rejection of difference.

Paul Seaward will be a Fellow at SCAS during the spring semester of 2026.