Collegiate Affiliation
Sociology

I am a sociologist of education who studies the intersection of race/caste and organizations. My dissertation-to-book project - Segregated Sociality: How University Life Shapes Inequality - is an ethnography of a public university in India. It centrally engages a key insight of theories of racialized organizations: despite their professed neutrality, organizations accommodate certain kinds of bodies and not others. What happens when historically underrepresented groups enter such organizations? I address this question in India’s higher educational context, which has recently expanded access through a comprehensive affirmative action policy. And yet, like many comparable higher educational contexts such as the US, Brazil, and South Africa, this dramatic expansion of access is accompanied by a neoliberal crisis of underfunding. My work examines how students navigate inequality in this context, and in doing so, shows how organizations are racialized. An article based on this research has been published in Sociological Forum.

My interest in analyzing inequities at the university has emerged from, and shapes, my pedagogical practices. I have developed my teaching philosophy by designing and instructing undergraduate level-courses in diverse classrooms of Delhi and Minnesota, and through participation in numerous pedagogy workshops, including one that I have been invited by the College of Liberal Arts to rejoin as a peer mentor this semester. My teaching philosophy center's sociology's power to challenge dominant ideas. As an instructor, I employ principles of inclusive excellence to ensure each student can access the discipline's transformative potential. 

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • MA: Sociology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  • M.Phil: Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University
  • MA: Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University
  • BA (Honors): Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi

Specialties

  • Racialized organizations
  • Education
  • Critical race and caste studies
  • Culture
  • Social theory
  • Qualitative research methods (ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis)
  • South Asia