I am a postdoctoral associate in Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment, Cornell University. I finished my doctoral research in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tentatively titled Speculative Sustainability: Start-Ups and the Ethnographic Life of Climate Futures, my dissertation-based book manuscript asks: despite decades of critique and amid escalating ecological disasters, why do technocratic paradigms for governing more-than-human worlds endure?

Speculative Sustainability brings the anthropology of sustainability and climate into dialogue with critical agrarian studies and science and technology studies (STS) to show how tech-entrepreneurial interventions coproduce climate futures. It does so through an ethnographic analysis of two tech-entrepreneurial sustainability enterprises in Indian agriculture: a well-funded enterprise rapidly scaling its low-methane and residue-management programs in rice production, and a slower-growing organic agriculture enterprise marketing organic products. Technology entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in India’s policy imaginaries for addressing environmental challenges, making it a productive site for examining this process. Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited fieldwork between 2022 and 2024, I trace connections between the enterprises’ offices in Bengaluru and Pune and farming communities across four Indian states. This approach allows me to critique these programs on their own terms while surfacing the everyday frictions that accompany their expansion in India’s predominantly smallholder agrarian context. Read more about my research here.

My research has been published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Critique of Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Economic & Political Weekly, Scroll.in, Wire.in, The Indian Express, The India Forum, and India in Transition. It has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and several UCLA-based centers. My research has been awarded the 2024 Eric R. Wolf Award for “exceptional graduate research on work and labor” from the Society for the Anthropology of Work, American Anthropological Association.

Alongside research, I co-direct ZealGrit Foundation, a nonprofit in rural Bihar, India. The organization works among communities of agricultural workers who are likely to be most affected by the climate crisis. I also serve as a core team member for the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS), where we are currently organizing a series of “Research Dialogues“ to create a much-needed forum that bridges critical academic research with the broader public. 

Prior to beginning my graduate studies in 2019, I finished my B.Tech. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2015, and my M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics in 2018. I also worked as a Chief Minister’s Fellow in Haryana for a year.