Biography

I teach political studies and am interested in the politics of sovereignty, development, nationalism, markets, corruption, infrastructures, states, and militarization. I study the everyday politics and poetics of conflicts, resistance, and social movements. While my academic training has been within the established disciplines of political science, political economy, and political theory, I read and write across multiple disciplinary formations (political and economic anthropology, political ecology, critical agrarian studies, political geography). 

My work on the political economy of horticulture in Kashmir approaches the political conflict through an embedded idea of the economy and markets. Drawing from an immersive ten year long ethnographic and comparative fieldwork in the disparate and inter-connected Himalayan regions of Kashmir and Himachal, my work follows the quotidian practices of agrarian productions, trade networks, market practices amid political uncertainties, bureaucratic networks of access and arrest and spectacular surveillance in militarized settings. It foregrounds the materialities of state-making using inter-disciplinary approaches to study its paradoxes within the routine and the exceptional. I am currently working on my first book manuscript.

I have taught core courses on Political Science I (Political Theory & Philosophy) & Political Science II (South Asian and Indian Politics & Social Theory), International Relations, Foundation of Social Sciences and Political Economic Theory at JGU and am committed to interdisciplinarity in teaching pedagogies. I have studied at Lady Shri Ram College (University of Delhi) and Centre for Political Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). 

My works have been published with national and international, peer-reviewed, Scopus indexed journals and popular magazines including Projections: MIT Journal of Urban Planning, Human Geography, History of the Present, Wasafiri, The Caravan. I was awarded the Institute of Human Geography Research Grant in 2023. My essay ‘Routines of Resistance’ was nominated for the Ramnath Goenka Award and received a special mention at the Red Ink Awards in conflict writing (2019).