BRIEF BIO:

Dr. Piyashi Dutta is a sociologist and media educator with over a decade of experience exploring how communities think, remember, and create meaning. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Tezpur University and is a double gold medalist from her postgraduate programme at the same institution. She completed her doctoral research as an ICSSR doctoral fellow. Her work brings together tribal studies, decolonising research methodologies, gender, and communication. Her research consistently interrogates the politics of knowledge production and foregrounds community epistemologies over extractive, archive-bound academic lenses. Her pioneering study of the whistling tradition (Jingrwai Iawbei) of the Khasi community in Kongthong, Meghalaya, remains the only systematic documentation of this extraordinary sonic practice. The research has drawn international attention, including coverage by the BBC. 

Dr. Dutta has published widely in Scopus-indexed journals, contributed to edited volumes with Routledge and Manipal University Press, and authored Stories of Resilience: Media Voices from the North-East — the first comprehensive report on media in Northeast India, produced with CHRI Delhi and hosted by the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). Piyashi believes knowledge can be gained by “travelling on foot, sitting by the hearth, listening more than speaking — and, when tired, being revived with a good cup of coffee.”

Updates: 

• Invited Speaker PReMI 2025, delivered a talk on "Tribal Worldviews and Epistemic Plurality: Reimagining Ethical AI ", 12 Dec, 2025

• Oxford Dharma Conference 2025, Oxford University, Presented a paper "𝐃𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐚, 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 & 𝐒𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐭𝐲: 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐉𝐚𝐧𝐣𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐲𝐚 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐄𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚" 6-7 Oct, 2025