School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Chancellor's Fellow in sociology and co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR).

I completed a PhD in sociology from the University of Edinburgh in 2016. My doctoral research was a comparative ethnographic study of women who migrate for marriage, over large and small distances, to become brides in rural north India (Uttar Pradesh). It integrated critiques of marriage from the global north and global south, providing new insights into the gendering of intimacy in an arranged marriage context. It explored the significance of macro and micro contexts, of processes emerging through a range of socio-economic inequalities across the life course within patriarchal, caste and cultural norms to understand kinship and conjugality speaking to broader disciplinary concerns within sociology and social anthropology. Prior to starting the PhD at Edinburgh in 2011, I worked on a three-year research project on gender and (labour) migration in India titled, Negotiating Rights, A Women's Movement Perspective, at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi.

My post-doctoral research, funded by the British Academy (2019-23), with South-Asian heritage older (50+ years) adults in Scotland, aimed to enhance theorisations of intimate life, care and ageing within wider contexts of social change and cultural diversity. It critically interrogated longstanding assumptions in Britain that Asians “care for their own”. Using the lens of relationality, it included a focus on reconfigured kinship networks, friendships, community and transnational relationships. Based on this research, my recent writing has focused on cross-category friendships, i.e., cross-gender and cross-cultural/racial friendships and on the boundaries (of intimacy) between friendship and kinship. I am also co-editing (with Lynn Jamieson, Sue Scott and Autumn Roesch-Marsh) a special issue on friendship in globalising contexts for the journal Families, Relationships and Societies. Currently, I am working on developing new research on boundary-crossing friendships and social change focused on racially minoritised young adults in Scotland and a second strand, focused on men and marriage in the Indian context. 

I am a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Families, Relationships and Societies.

Education

Ph.D. Sociology, University of Edinburgh

M.Phil. Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

M.A. Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

B.A. Sociology, University of Delhi

Publications

Book

2021 [2022, Paperback]. Moving for Marriage: Inequalities, Intimacy and Women's Lives in Rural North India. SUNY Press (Albany: New York) book series Genders in the Global South. 

Shortlisted for the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) Book Prize, 2023 

Edited Book

2024. Gender in South Asia and Beyond. Zubaan: New Delhi (with Hugo Gorringe and Radhika Govinda).

Articles & Book Chapters

2025. Navigating cultural intimacies: Long-lasting friendships in the Scottish South Asian diasporas. The Sociological Review, 0(0).

2022. Mid- and Later-life Cross-Sex Friendships in Minority Ethnic Contexts: Insights from Scotland. Sociological Research Online. 27 (4): 947–963. 

2020. Covid-19 Public Health Messages and Minority Ethnic Older People in Scotland. Discover Society, (September 11).

2019. 'For how long can your piharwale intervene?' Accessing Natal kin support in rural north India. Modern Asian Studies, 53 (5): 1613-45.

2019. 'Flexible' caste boundaries: Cross-regional marriage as 'mixed' marriage in rural north India. Contemporary South Asia, 27 (2): 214-28.

2018. 'Now it is difficult to Get Married': Contextualising Cross-Regional Marriage and Bachelorhood in a North Indian Village, in Sharada Srinivasan and Shuzhuo Li (eds.). Scarce Women and Surplus Men in China and India: Macro Demographics versus Local Dynamics. Cham: Springer.

Current PhD Student

Nuria Lopez Vazquez: Care and "Choice" in Sustainable Agricultural Development: Women’s
Home Gardens in Myanmar. 

Kajal Boraste: Nationalism, Neoliberalism and Dalit women's "empowerment" in western India.

If you are interested in being supervised by me, please see the links below (opening in new windows) for more information:

• PhD in Sociology
• PhD in South Asian Studies