Caste and Gender in Higher Education
Time: March 17, 2026, 12:30 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Location: Online
Celebrating Women's History Month, Women's and Gender Studies invites guest scholars to discuss the need to make our classrooms equitable spaces.
Join Drishtawati Bargi (University of Michigan), Swati Kamble (independent researcher), and Prajwal Gaikwad (Concordia University) for a zoom conversation that engages contemporary debates across disciplines in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, to address the intersectional experiences of caste and gender in educational spaces globally.
About the panelists:
Drishadwati ("Drisha") Bargi is a Collegiate Fellow and incoming Tenure Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan. She works on caste, democracy and remediation, with a comparative reading of theories of Fascism in Europe and the Global South. Bargi has published in Journal Of Narrative Theory, Cultural Critique, Feminist Media and Performance and Economic and Political Weekly. Before joining University of Michigan, she was a postdoc at Emory. She received her Ph.D. from University of Minnesota, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.
Dr. Swati Kamble is an anti-caste, intersectional feminist activist and researcher with over 15 years of experience studying women’s mobilization, activism, and social movements. Her work focuses on understanding what drives marginalized, oppressed caste women to organize and advocate for their rights despite facing systemic caste and patriarchal backlash. Kamble's Ph.D. research explored the impact of Dalit women activists on policy processes, particularly how they navigate androcentric and casteist bureaucratic spaces of power. Through this work, she highlighted how Dalit women, as agents of change, strategically leverage their intersectional knowledge and identities to assert their rights. Currently based in Belgium, Dr. Kamble is an elected member of the local Green Party’s internal council. She is also an active member of the Global Educators Alliance, a collective of South Asian scholars, educators, and practitioners dedicated to developing transformative education models.
Prajwal Gaikwad is a doctoral student in Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. Their doctoral research examines goddess-worship traditions in Hinduism and their role in shaping understandings of queerness in rural India. Prajwal’s academic interests include Phule–Ambedkarite studies, queer studies, and cultural studies. In 2023, they were elected President of the Students’ Union at the University of Hyderabad, becoming the first Dalit-queer person to hold this position in India. Prajwal has also been actively involved in Ambedkarite student movements at Fergusson College, Pune, and the University of Hyderabad, committed towards the cause of Social Justice in Higher Education.