D. Parthasarathy is the India Value Fund Chair Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is also Convener of the interdisciplinary program in Climate Change at IIT Bombay. He holds a bachelor and two master’s degrees as well as a PhD in sociology. He has earlier worked or held visiting positions at the Australian National University, National University of Singapore, and Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. He is the author of Collective Violence in a Provincial City (1997) and has co-edited “Women’s Self Help Groups: Restructuring Socio-Economic Development,” (2011) and “Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia” (2013). He has carried out research projects and published in the areas of urban studies, women and development, law and governance, climate studies, and disaster risk and vulnerability. His current research interests include urban commons, transnational urbanism, gender, development, violence, legal pluralism and resource governance, and vulnerability to climate / disaster risks. He has designed, taught and conducted workshops and training modules for the last fifteen years in the areas of gender sensitive communication, diversity in research and teaching and sexual harassment in the workplace.