I am a legal anthropologist and socio-legal scholar, with broad interests in workers’ health, compensation for harm, the welfare state, and trade union struggles.
My doctoral thesis, Silicosis and the State: Valuing Life and Labour in Contemporary India, was an ethnography of a welfare intervention for workers who contracted occupational lung disease in Rajasthan, northwestern India. Based on sixteen months of participant observation in the life of a stone-workers’ trade union and a health clinic, I followed how workers, activists, bureaucrats, and doctors negotiate monetary recompense for silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by inhaling hazardous dust. My work demonstrates that state welfare is not only a bureaucratic form of governance, but it is also a arena where political claims, moral imaginaries, and new kinds of solidarities can be forged. This project won the Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize in 2026, and the fieldwork for it was supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
At Cambridge, I am developing this project into a book manuscript and writing several pieces on state welfare, industrial deregulation, and work-related injury. I am also in the process of beginning new lines of research on climate change and insurance, as well as on shifting wages and conditions of work in the service industry.
In another life, I worked as a researcher with the Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies, an organisation working on the right to food and shelter, the rights of informal workers, and on communal violence in India.
I am committed to sharing my experiences in writing funding and fellowship applications, particularly with marginalized students from South Asia. If you would like me to provide feedback on your materials, please write to me (with sufficient time in advance of your deadline!).