GKII Student Travel Grant Awardees Announced for the Social Insecurity Project

We are pleased to announce Rishabh Kumar, Sherina Poyyail, and Sonal Sharma as the 2023 awardees of GKII’s Girish and Himangi Rishi Student Travel Grant supporting The Social Insecurity Project, headed by Principal Investigator Rina Agarwala.

The Girish and Himangi Rishi Student Travel Grant is designed to support student travel to India, leveraging the strengths of existing Johns Hopkins University research programs. Mr. Rishi, an alumnus of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), is an accomplished tech executive, now CEO of the industrial software company Cognite. He and his wife, Himangi Rishi, established the fellowships with GKII to connect their passion for business and technology with the challenges of urban hunger, sustainable diets, and health inequity.

Meet Rishabh Kumar

Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences: Bachelor of Arts in International Studies
Concentration: International Development and South Asia

“The intended outcome of the visit is to assist in developing the larger research project about security. The findings from my interviews will provide important qualitative data about the perceptions of young Indians towards security (be it in the economic or social sense). The current hypothesis is that older groups that think about security in the sense of social security, and younger ones think about it in far more individualistic terms. Thus my work will provide some sociological insight into this large cohort that can point towards more areas for research.”

Meet Sherina Poyyail

St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai: Master of Public Policy

“As part of the social insecurity project, I have been tasked with interviewing a number of young people. The visits will largely be with students and working youth across Mumbai. One-on-one interactions with the subjects will give us a foundational understanding of how youth across caste, class and gender lines perceive social security and how it intersects with their various identities.

As the project is still in its initial phases, Mumbai presents a diverse set of population to gather insights. The ndings from this series of interviews will help the investigator and the team further draw connections and build a stronger hypothesis. The nature of the research is largely qualitative.”

Meet Sonal Sharma

Johns Hopkins University, Department of Sociology PhD Candidate

The focus on the experiences of paid domestic workers has been a part of Sharma’s deep engagement with the issue of domestic workers’ rights for more than a decade, particularly in India. As a part of this engagement, he has been an active member and the regional coordinator for the South Asia region of the Research Network for Domestic Workers’ Rights (RN-DWR). Before arriving at Johns Hopkins to pursue his doctoral studies, he worked in the field of urbanization at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

The Social Insecurity Project examines how people differentially define and experience social insecurity across gender, race, and national context.  The project will be launched in India, United States, and Denmark. With the generous support of the GKII Student Travel Grant, we will examine social insecurity among a specific population in India—that is, India’s aspiring youth (ages 17-25). This population provides an ideal lens into how perceptions of the future are being acted upon. Our research will span 2 Indian cities (New Delhi and Bombay) and examine differences across gender and class. Our findings will help build a new analytical measure for social insecurity that will inform further analyses on social insecurity and eventually policy. We are looking forward to sharing the results of our findings soon! More information about the project can be directed to Dr. Agarwala.