Parag Jyoti Saikia

Parag Jyoti Saikia is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies the construction of a hydropower dam to understand how infrastructures in-the-making shape everyday life, environment, and geopolitics in a frontier region of India. He is currently a SAPIENS Public Scholar Training Fellow (2023-2024) with SAPIENS magazine. His dissertation research was supported by Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from University North Carolina’s Graduate School. Parag has been associated with activist organizations working on dams, rivers, and environment in India for almost a decade. These experiences along with his belonging to the area he works on for his doctoral research, has made him committed to engaged public scholarship. Parag has written several articles, op-eds, and blogs about dams, rivers, politics, and citizenship both in English and Assamese, his mother tongue.