Bhaswati Mondal is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Rampurhat College, located in the district of Birbhum in West Bengal, India. After obtaining her Master’s degree, she completed her PhD from the Department of Geography, The University of Burdwan with the help of financial grant from the University Grants Commission in the form of Junior and Senior Research Fellowships. Her core areas of research include mobility studies, rural development and urban environment. She has presented her research findings on different perspectives of commuting in a number of national and international seminars held across the country. She won the Young Geographer 2017 award at the International Seminar and 48th Regional Science Conference held in Tripura University. She has published articles in different peer-reviewed journals and as book-chapters in edited volumes. She thinks herself to be a learner of geography.Gopa Samanta is a Professor in the Department in Geography, The University of Budwan. Her core areas of research and teaching interest are Urban, Gender and Mobility studies. With grants from different national and international institutions such as the UGC, ICSSR, Ford Foundation, Australia India Institute and INR-France, IRD-France, she has completed a number of research projects with interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborative research teams. As a geographer, she has a passion for undertaking in-depth and field-based empirical research. She is the joint author of two books: 1. Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia, published from Yale University Press; 2. Negotiating Terrain in Local Governance: Freedom, Functioning and Barriers of Women Councillors in India, published from Springer. She acts as peer reviewer of academically acclaimed journals such as Community Development Journal, Development in Practice, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Local Environment, Economic and Political Weekly, etc. She was on the editorial board of the Journal of Mobility Studies called Transfers. She has acted as Visiting Fellow of Australian National University and Paris Diderot University, and as Gender Chair of Paris Sorbonne University.
