Scholars 2023: Ragini Siruguri, Rutuja Rokade, Sai Sandeep Kumar Sanka and Saniya Ahmad
This week we have Ragini Siruguri, Rutuja Rokade, Sai Sandeep Kumar Sanka and Saniya Ahmad.
Ragini is joining University of Reading for an MA in Research in Typography and Graphic Communication. Rutuja will be going to the University of Oxford for an MSc in History of Science, Medicine and Technology. Sandeep will be attending Imperial College, London for an MSc in Advanced Aeronautical Engineering. Saniya will be joining University of Cambridge for an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies.
Ragini Siruguri
Ragini Siruguri is a visual communication designer whose practice lies at the intersection of graphic design and pedagogy, photography, books and writing. Her approach to work is guided by a belief that any form of design is inseparable from the cultural and political context it is created within.
Since 2016, Ragini has been working with Tara Books, an independent publishing collective renowned for experiments in the art of book-making. Outside of this, she is interested in photography as a way to document visual culture in India, especially the use of colour, pattern and typography and the interaction of image and text in locally produced objects. Most recently, Ragini has undertaken projects in the field of design education, mentoring students of an online graphic design course offered by AND Academy, a design institute in New Delhi.
Ragini's inquiry focuses on bringing in a higher level of integration between design education and practice and the rich art and artisanal practices in India. She believes that it is the local, regional forms of design that will help formulate a history of design in the Indian context, along with theories and methods unique to the country. She would like to contribute to design research and writing in the Indian context and be an active part of a growing movement to make design more inclusive, accessible and rooted in the Indian aesthetic.
Rutuja Rokade
Rutuja Rokade believes in the transformative power of education. The liberal arts framework of her undergraduate studies at Krea University allowed her to explore a range of courses from literature and humanities to the sciences, even though she majored in biology. She braided her different academic interests in exploring the field of the history of science so as to critically analyse the sciences themselves as a product of both social and historical construction. She is particularly passionate about exploring the history of science from the margins, a space she is intimately familiar with. She has found that this approach can be well understood using the lens of the history of diseases in colonial India. She will be pursuing an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at Oxford University.
She loves to read, explore new cafes, visit museums, and has recently learnt to crochet. She cannot wait to explore Oxford along these dimensions and so many more through the opportunities that it offers!
Sai Sandeep Kumar Sanka
Sai Sandeep Kumar Sanka’s interest in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research developed early on as an undergraduate student. Through his academic and professional experiences, his curiosity evolved into an interest in computational continuum mechanics as a method of problem solving.
Since graduating from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka with a B Tech in Mechanical Engineering, he has been working as an engineer with the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO. At Imperial College London, he will be pursuing the MSc Advanced Aeronautical Engineering program. The program offers multidisciplinary training in aerospace structures, aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, and development of computational tools for structural and aerodynamic analysis.
With the global push to increase wind energy production, usage of numerical simulations for optimizing wind turbine blades and wind farm layout has been on the rise. He intends to use the skills he will gain from this program, to leverage his prior experience in computational mechanics and develop novel and efficient tools for studying the complex fluid-structure interactions (FSI) encountered by modern wind turbine blades to aid sustainable designs for the future.
Apart from work and research, he loves reading fiction, especially the works of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Camus and the likes. He also love following motorsports – mainly MotoGP and F1.
Saniya Ahmad
Saniya Ahmad completed her honours degree in Political Science at Lady Shri Ram College for Women in 2023. She will be pursuing an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Her inclination towards this course is informed by an interest in channelizing the study of South Asia into an interdisciplinary exploration of South Asian Islam, particularly the religious sensibilities of marginalized Muslims. To this end, her proposed MPhil thesis, with its weaving together of political philosophy, Islamic Studies, oral history, and anthropology, would contribute to knowledge on how questions of politics and theology influence the ethical subject formation of minoritized Muslims.
She has undertaken a few research projects exploring the intersection of theology, anthropology, and politics and has been a part of various human rights initiatives. In addition, she is the host of Haqq, an academic podcast on Islamic Studies wherein she interviews scholars with the aim of bringing the Islamic tradition into conversation with secular forms of knowledge.
Through her masters at Cambridge, Saniya aims to bring forth all those aspirations, assumptions, fears, sensibilities, and desires of Indian Muslims that significantly contribute to, but are nevertheless not included in, our conventional understanding of religion and politics. In doing so, she wants to dissect how such an exploration may contribute to knowledge on the anthropology of Islam. She, therefore, believes that an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies would enable her to translate her academic interests into meaningful action.
