I am a cultural anthropologist and an assistant professor of global affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
As a cultural anthropologist, I explore how global and domestic policies addressing gender inequality shape people’s understandings of their relationships with institutions, other people, and themselves. My research examines how representations of family and kinship shape contemporary life, from the intimacy of everyday interaction to the structure of state policy to transnational efforts to promote human rights. My current research relies on insights from linguistic anthropology, medical anthropology, and legal anthropology in order to examine how human rights discourses and kinship systems come together in efforts to address gendered violence in urban North India. My next project will explore how ideas about gender and kinship inform political representation in local village councils, or panchayats, in the Indian state of Haryana.