School of Social and Political Science

Background

I have a PhD in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and research and teaching interests in transnational feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and gender and sexuality in the South. My PhD thesis was based on an ethnographic study of what I understand as "startup capitalism" in Bangalore, India. It is the basis for a monograph now under contract with the University of California Press, tentatively titled "Startup Capitalism: Experimental Lives and Feminized Labor in India." 

I am also writing a textbook for introductory classes in gender studies with Drs. Abe Weil, Kelly Sharron, and Carly Thomsen, under contract with Routledge.

With Smriti Srinivas at UC Davis, I am editing an anthology of writing on the city of Bangalore featuring activist dispatches, ethnographic nonfiction, and research-based chapters. Deploying the analytic of "city as method," the volume examines how the place and space of cities in the South offer new analytics and aesthetics through which to theorise the urban.

My current research builds on a two-year National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral position that I held between 2017–2019 examining speculative urbanism in cities of the South. My research from this project explores histories of scientific knowledge–formation that shape cities of the South by combining imperial ideas about the environment, health, and progress with racial neoliberalism. Specifically, I ask how might we theorise an urban politics that exceeds the human to consider how ecological worlds shape our visions and demands for the future.

At Edinburgh, I also serve as Associate Director of GenderED, building university-wide collective expertise and explorations around interdisciplinary questions of gender and sexuality.