Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences

Shalini Sharma is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune where she also heads the Science Media Centre. She has a PhD in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London as a Felix Fellow. She focuses on cities, culture, and environment relations. Her current research/teaching focuses on two key areas: a) Disaster studies and environmental justice b) Media studies and Science Communication. 

Dr. Sharma is interested in learning what knowledges are crucial for sustainable communities, and how these knowledges can be applied for building resilience and adaptive capacities of people/public policy. She has contributed to IPCC AR6, WG-II on cities and settlements. This drew on her work as Assistant Professor at TISS Guwahati in Northeast India and her postdoctoral research on indigenous urbanisms and climate change.  She was a Commonwealth and Fulbright Fellow at the University of East Anglia and Princeton, respectively, during 2018-2020.  

Her work on environmental/disaster sociology also engages with applied humanities. Her interest in multimedia memory projects with pedagogical goals is long-standing. She was instrumental in setting up the Remember Bhopal Museum. She is also a member of the Living Waters Museum and the Centre for Water Research at IISER Pune.  During 2020-22, she led a joint project with UEA, producing over 60 original oral histories about climate activism in India.  With the Science Communication Unit at UWE, Bristol, she co-led the British Council-funded exploring science communication project. As part of the Leeds LivingBodiesObject team, she has actively engaged with the project’s participatory and creative approaches. She also co-leads ‘AQUAMUSE’, a Dutch Government funded project that looks at museum-making in three river basins: Blue Nile, Volta in Burkina Faso, and Sundarbansu/Ganga in India. 

She was selected by the UNESCO Climate Change Education Office in Paris for training on national curriculum and strategic planning towards climate education goals. However, she enjoys teaching the most. In 2022, she received IISER Pune’s Excellence in Teaching Award.