Nisar Kannangara is a social anthropologist with Ph.D. in anthropology from Pondicherry University (Central), India, in 2019, focusing on the study of democracy and violence in Kerala. Currently he is a Consultant at Academic and Research Team, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) Bengaluru. From February 2021 to March 2024, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Inequality and Human Development Programme at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India. Prior to joining NIAS, he held research positions at the Anthropology Research Wing of Kerala Institute for Research Training and Development Studies of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (KIRTADS) and the Directorate of Culture, Government of Kerala. His area of research includes the social and cultural dynamics of democracy and political parties, ethnographies of indigenous housing, and inequality and autonomous adaptation to climate change in South Asian contexts. He is a recipient of the prestigious British Academy Knowledge Frontier Symposia Follow-on Award in 2023.
Kalaiarasi Kandhan Sagunthala is currently working at the M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai. Before this she was working as the Project Associate at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, where she worked on the autonomous adaptation to climate change. She holds a Masters Degree in climate science and policy from TERI University, New Delhi and has done her bachelors in Geography. Her area of interest includes Climate change adaptation, food security, water conservation, and disaster management. She has also worked in the areas of gender mainstreaming in forest resource management, mapping stakeholders for devising Incentive-Based Mechanisms for natural resource management in different locations of the countries.