Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan has three decades of teaching experience and two decades of planning advocacy and public education events and campaigns.

Chaitanya is open to academic programming assignments in areas relating to gender, governance, international relations and security studies:

  • Course design and teaching: Curriculum design, teaching and evaluation.

  • Small academic seminars or conferences: We can provide end-to-end help from the concept paper to the event to the report.

  • Webinars and lectures: Conceptualisation and curation.

Chaitanya does not have the capacity to manage logistics but this is something that can be negotiated.

Contact us: [email protected]



Educational programmes

Chaitanya’s earliest projects were two Summer Study Abroad programmes in partnership with Michigan State University. Since then, Dr. Rajagopalan has innovated and initiated several educational programmes, from single session workshops to longer courses, on topics related to gender, peace and security.

The Culture, Politics and Globalization in South Asia course, a study abroad summer course offered by michigan State University and organised by Chaitanya in 2007 and 2008, consisted of lectures, discussions, tutorials, and field trips to important cultural and political sites in Tamil Nadu, the largest state of southern India.The course drew undergraduate students across social science majors.

For Prajnya, Dr. Rajagopalan has conceptualised and co-created:

  • Gender, militarisation and violence programmes, offered usually in conjunction with the Prajnya 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence

  • Preamble education workshops, offered in 2019-20

  • Citizenship for Democracy 3-day course, offered in 2016

  • Peace and Gender Lunchtime Lecture biannual online series with attendance certification, from 2020-2025, with Sansristi, Bhubaneswar

  • The Disarmament Toolkit, disarmament education course offered annually since 2022, in partnership with the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific.

Dr. Rajagopalan has also designed and taught one-credit courses at James Madison College, Michigan State University in 2018 and 2019.

  • How to change the world, 2018, on the basics of planning advocacy campaigns

  • When the horizon leans forward: The Women, Peace and Security Agenda, 2019


Academic Events

In 2006 and 2008, Chaitanya organised Fora on Non-Traditional Security topics in Chennai for Delhi-based WISCOMP on Disasters and Security and Gender, HIV and Security, respectively.

Since then, Dr. Rajagopalan, as founder and Managing Trustee of Prajnya, has worked with a series of Campaign Coordinators and the Prajnya Team to plan and organise 12 editions of the Prajnya 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence. Unlike most campaigns in this period, Prajnya’s campaigns had programmes on every one of the 16 days, in varied formats, on varied topics, reaching out in person and online to various audience groups. Academic and pedagogical elements characterised the structure and content of the campaigns, including research symposia (in person and on the blog), teaching events and workshops and research consultations.

In Tamil Nadu, the advocacy phase of the Surviving Violence went beyond traditional launch events, with interactive group discussions and workshops around the report, its findings and the challenges of service delivery. The Surviving Violence project was also part of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days campaign through research presentations, webinar discussions and report-based workshops, all held online.


Curated Projects at Prajnya

Dr. Rajagopalan is the editor or co-editor of several academic anthologies. In addition, she has been the curating editor of Prajnya’s blog symposia, mostly on themes related to gender violence. With the Prajnya team, she has a great deal of experience in conceptualising and curating public education initiatives–from Twitter campaigns to webinar series. This is now a service Chaitanya is able to offer, especially to educational institutions and to social sector organisations. 

Prajnya blog symposia
Anthologies
Webinar series