School of Social and Political Science

Background

I have a PhD in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and research and teaching interests in transnational feminisms, capitalist spaces and temporalities, and labor and technology 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 forthcoming later this year with the University of California Press, titled "Experimental Time: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India." 

I am also writing a textbook for introductory classes in gender studies with Drs. Abe Weil, Kelly Sharron, and Carly Thomsen, Routledge ('24).

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 unfolds along two major strands. One project is concerned with the transforming conditions of social reproduction under entrepreneurial and platform capitalism. Within this, I have also undertaken collaborative and multimodal ethnographic fieldwork with workers in entrepreneurial companies to innovate with new methods needed to understand work that is fragmented and dispersed across city spaces. My research focuses on forms of difference within entrepreneurial economies to understand how historical structures of oppression shape access to finance, funding, and possibilities for labor mobility.  

A second strand of research queries the ecological costs and entanglements of large scale data projects. Interrogating technological visions for environmental justice, I ask how we might trace the changes in land and water that accompany a move to "cloud" economies. Offering a grounded and historical context to imaginations and practices of ecological futures, this project situates technological future-making within the infrastructural and logistical architectures through which it is materialised. 

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