Aarti Kawlra has been the Academic Director of the IIAS education collaboration programme, Humanities Across Borders (HAB) since 2016. HAB’s multi-university consortium across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas facilitates inter-disciplinary curricular interventions and context-sensitive (ecological & civic) pedagogies, for building a next generation of locally embedded, globally connected scholars.
A social anthropologist trained at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences IIT Delhi (1998), Aarti was affiliated with the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai as a co-principal investigator of the ICSSR-funded project “Discourses of Craft and Education in Colonial Madras” (2018). Her book "We Who Wove with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India" (Orient Blackswan, 2018) uses the methods of anthropology, social history, geography, and cultural studies to discursively interrogate colonial and postcolonial framings of culture, heritage, design, and development as they collide with artisanal self-representation in south India.
She has developed courses and taught at the major design schools in India as well as at IIT Madras. Her experience in working with national and international craft advocacy groups and institutions (she is the co-founder of an ethical craft production enterprise for women workers in rural Tamil Nadu, is research advisor to the Thinai Foundation, Chennai and President of the global network, Knowledge House for Craft), has helped shape the place and practice based pedagogical experiments of the HAB programme at Leiden. She is the co-founding editor of the Humanities Across Borders Methodologies book series of IIAS, published by Amsterdam University Press.