Aarti Kawlra is the Academic Director of an education collaboration program, Humanities Across Borders (HAB) of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, The Netherlands, since 2016.
Aarti is a social anthropologist trained at the Dept of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics and the Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi (1998). Aarti was affiliated to the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai as a co-principal investigator of the ICSSR funded project “Discourses of Craft and Education in Colonial Madras” (2018). Her book We Who Wove with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India (Orient Blackswan, 2018) uses the methods of anthropology, social history, human geography, and cultural studies to discursively interrogate colonial and postcolonial framings of culture, heritage, design, technology, and development as they collide with artisanal self-representation in south India.
Her experience in working with local, national, and international craft advocacy groups and institutions has helped shape the place and practice-based educational experiments at Leiden, such as the In situ Graduate Schools (ISGS) and the mobile enabled Accession Card tool for situated storytelling to support curricular interventions using ecologically & civically grounded pedagogies.
She is on the advisory board of the River Cities Network (RCN) at IIAS, https://www.iias.asia/programmes/river-cities-network, and of the Journal of Modern Craft http://journalofmoderncraft.com/ published by Berg, UK. She is the co-founding editor of the Humanities Across Borders Methodologies book series of IIAS, published by Amsterdam/Leiden University Press; the inaugural volume titled Words in Use, co-edited with Mohomodou Houssouba, is forthcoming.
