School of Social and Political Science

Background

*I am currently not accepting PhD students  

I have a PhD in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and research and teaching interests in transnational feminisms, critical data studies, and work and labor. My work develops creative and multimodal methods including video work, filmic essays, and photography. My first monograph "Experimental Time: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India" is based on my in-depth ethnographic research into the political economy and lived experiences of life and labor under startup capitalism in India's technology hub, Bengaluru/Bangalore. It won the Sara A Whaley Book Award (2025) from the National Women's Studies Association and an Honorable Mention from the Society of Anthropology of Work Book Award (2025).

I'm also passionate about the feminist studies classroom. Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader is a co-written textbook for the field with Drs. Abe Weil, Kelly Sharron, and Carly Thomsen, (Routledge May 2025) and its unique contribution lies in combining seminal texts in the field with contemporary work by feminist scholars who engage, extend and critique those ideas. This is the first textbook with original contributions by Feminist Studies PhDs, and it's accompanied by a multimedia website that extends how students learn about feminist ideas.

Related to my interest in thinking from the South, I am completing work on an anthology of writing on the city of Bangalore with Professor Smriti Srinivas at UC Davis. This is a volume that features activist dispatches, ethnographic nonfiction, and research-based chapters. The volume examines how the place and space of cities in the South offer new analytics and aesthetics through which to theorise the urban and is under contract with Bloomsbury Press.

My current research leads an investigation into how data futures are produced through political, infrastructural, ecological and human labor. While we often imagine the "Cloud" as an amorphous and immaterial assemblage, my research moves to locating computing in its material and place-based dimensions. Through fieldwork in the UK and India, I examine the move to building green data infrastructures and labor-chains promising fair wages and commitments to "ethical AI" thus querying the ecological costs and entanglements of large scale data projects. I'm particularly interested in asking how we might trace changes in land, air and water that accompany a move to cloud economies.