(Director, September 2026 – present)

Biography:

Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar is a geographer and Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of the PRODIG research unit. He holds a PhD in development geography from Université de Paris. His research combines political, economic and social geography and focuses on India’s urban and industrial transformations.

His engagement with India began in 2012, when he studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi as part of his degree at Sciences Po Rennes. He first joined the Centre de Sciences Humaines as a visiting researcher in 2015 and has since returned regularly for collaborative projects and fieldwork across India, including extended stays in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pharmaceutical entrepreneurs in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, his doctoral research examined how small and medium-sized Indian firms shape South-South production networks and contribute to peculiar forms of globalisation. He later extended this research to biopharmaceuticals and biosimilars, examining the circulation of pharmaceutical technologies across the Global South, particularly in India, Brazil, South Africa and Cuba.

His current research examines the environmental and health consequences of industrialisation in India. Through fieldwork in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, and the Cauvery River basin in South India, he studies how industrial pollution is produced, measured, regulated, experienced and sometimes rendered invisible. Conducted with Indian scientific institutions, including the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, this work combines STS, political ecology, One Health and environmental sciences. It focuses on how communities, scientists, public authorities and industrial actors produce knowledge (and ignorance) about toxic environments.

Alongside his academic work, he seeks to make research on India accessible to wider audiences through mainstream media appearances and documentary filmmaking, which he also uses as a method of research and dissemination.

Recent publications:

• Graber, Nils, and Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar. 2026. “Between Technology Transfer and South–South Collaboration: An Indo-Cuban Experiment in Biopharmaceutical Innovation.” BioSocieties.
• Quet, Mathieu, Koichi Kameda, Jessica Pourraz, and Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar, eds. 2025. Technoscientific Globalisation from Below. Manchester: Mattering Press.
• Rault-Chodankar, Yves-Marie. 2025. “Making Value Off-Patent: India’s Pharmaceutical Globalisation.” In Technoscientific Globalisation from Below, 247–271. Manchester: Mattering Press.
• Rault-Chodankar, Yves-Marie. 2025. “L’Inde dans la mondialisation pharmaceutique Sud-Sud.” Géoconfluences.
• Rault-Chodankar, Yves-Marie, and Dinar Kale. 2023. “‘Manufacturers without Factories’ and Economic Development in the Global South: India’s Pharmaceutical Firms.” Journal of Economic Geography 23 (2): 319–341.
• Rault-Chodankar, Yves-Marie. 2022. “‘We Care… Because Care Is Growth’: The Low-Tech Imaginaries of India’s Small-Scale Pharmaceutical Enterprises.” SSM – Qualitative Research in Health 2: 100144.

Full list of publications on HAL