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Cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies and affiliated with Cultural Studies.

Research Interests

My current research focusses on low class, racialized migrant men working in immigrant-niche sectors in Southern Europe. In the project titled, Undocumented South Asian Male Migrants in Greece: Understanding Masculinity, Love, and Work in Troubled Times, funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant, I undertake a novel theorization on how culturally-specific norms of “failed” masculinity, precipitated by neoliberal reforms, propel migration trajectories for low-class racialized men. I argue this with a case study of undocumented male migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India who are employed in immigrant-niche sectors of agriculture and urban informal economy in Greece. Along a similar trajectory, I have begun studying how anti-immigrant discourses, far right populism, racism, and regimes of restrictive migration governance combine to determine gendered experiences of racialized lower-class migrant workers in host countries. As a PI, and working with six other colleagues, I study the flash points that trigger racial oppression from host communities against racialized migrant workers working in agriculture, gig economy or in the informal sector in Greece, Italy, and Spain.

My second project with racialized migrant male workers is a collaborative participatory action research project of Photovoice. “This is Evidence": Re-presenting South Asian Migrant Men in Greece (SSHRC Connection Grant). I collaborated with groups of South Asian migrant men in Greece who used their cell phones to take photographs, record videos, and narrate their stories. The result was a multi-media exhibition and a digital archive (www.thisisevidence.com). The installation with a reconstructed plastic shack migrant housing, photographs, video shorts, ambient audio, and maps has been held in Greece, Canada, and Belgium.

My ongoing research in India examines the role of religion, caste, and political economy in shaping relational male identities and masculinity among lower classes of rural Indian men in contemporary North India. Focussing on the same region, it analyses the crisis of masculinities faced by lower classes of rural Indian men from the early 1990s when India embarked on neoliberal reforms. I undertake a study of the dominant Hindu Jat caste, the religious minority of the Meo, and the Dalits (formerly untouchables) to understand how male privilege and masculine norms are dislocated by market-led growth policies.

My doctoral work, Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Contemporary India: Examining the Link Between Cross-region Marriages, Neoliberal Capitalism, and New Forms of Gender Subordination focussed on marriage migration in rural North India. My research makes theoretical and empirical contributions in feminist political economy and migration studies by foregrounding dispossession in the most intimate of human relations – marriage. My monograph, Why Would I Be Married Here is based on this research.

Supervision

I welcome graduate students interested in topics related to migration, masculinity, India, and gender in the Global South. I also welcome students in broad topics of interest related to caste, marriage-migration, and collaborative visual research methods.