Prof. Swati Banerjee

Personal Info

Swati Banerjee, PhD is Associate Dean, Office of Alum Affairs, OAA TISS and Professor and Program Convenor at the School of Social Work, Centre for Livelihoods and Social Innovation at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She also co-ordinates the Right Livelihood College, RLC- Mumbai which is part of the global network of universities initiated by The Right Livelihood Foundation that connects academia to practice. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at Lund University, Sweden and visiting faculty at many Universities across the world including University of Roskilde, Lund University, University of British Columbia etc. One of her key focus in teaching is pedagogical innovations, and her current endeavor in this direction is a collaboration with University of California, Santacruz (UCSC) for global innovations in Higher Education through Global Classroom/Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), being offered as part of her existing course on Inclusive Design Thinking Lab (IDTL): Innovations for Social Change along with, Global Political Ecology offered by UCSC. Prof. Banerjee is also a recipient of several fellowships from national and international organizations including German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Ford Foundation, Erasmus Mundus and Erasmus Plus. She has been leading several international collaborations and research globally and has been heavily involved in research studies at both national level (including National Rural Livelihood Mission, Government of India, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) and at international level (including European Commission, ESRC, Erasmus Plus, etc). The key thematic focus of her research includes People Centered Social Innovation and Development; Social Context and Education, Community-Based and Grassroots Social Entrepreneurship and Empowerment of Women and Marginalized Communities, Human Centered and Inclusive Design Thinking for addressing key societal challenges of marginalities; Livelihoods and Post-Development concerns of Marginalized Communities (with a focus on Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups-PVTGs, Nomadic tribes etc), Participatory Methodologies, tools and approaches for Social Innovation and Development Practice with a focus on ‘ecologies of knowledges’ and knowledges from the grassroots. She has several publications to her credit and is the editor of the recently published books, ‘People Centred Social Innovation: An emerging paradigm with global potential’ (Routledge, New York) and ‘Theory of Social Enterprise and Pluralism: Social Movements, Solidarity Economy, and Global South’ (Routledge, New York). She is Associate Editor of the Social Enterprise Journal and part of the editorial team of the Board of Reviewers and Consultants of the International Journal on Space and Culture, India. She is also involved in global discussions on social innovation, poverty reduction and achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in United Nations ESCAP Asia Pacific regional forums. Simultaneously, she is part of several grassroots innovation initiatives in India including ‘UDAAN’, a field action initiative of TISS which is primarily engaged in building a collective enterprise of poor and migrant women from a low income neighbourhood, close to the dumping ground in the city of Mumbai. She thus envisions to work towards addressing marginalities through social innovation and grassroots social entrepreneurship with a focus on gender and intersectional knowledges, epistemic justice and repoliticization of processes of participation and empowerment.