Hello and Jai Bhim!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication Studies at the Moody College of Communication with a graduate portfolio in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

My research is interested in questions that deal with unsettling the category of the human (hello, Sylvia Wynter). I work at the intersection of organizational and rhetorical communication, critical caste studies, and Black studies. My ongoing work is committed to placing caste as a global analytical category while expanding the decolonial scope of communication studies. With my dissertation, I examine the South Asian diaspora in Texas to argue that caste logics permeate to non-South Asian bodies (racialized immigrant labor, in this study) and make a strong case of understanding work and stigma through lens of caste. At the same time, I am interrogating the contestation of caste in the diaspora by interviewing anti-caste activists and organizers to understand how anti-caste movement operates in a transnational context.

I have been awarded the prestigious University Continuing Fellowship for my dissertation work.

In my personal time, I aim to do something new every other month. Like making new recipes, trying new flavors of coffee, playing co-op video games on my couch, and doting on my cat.

Before Ph.D., I worked in communications for digital and gender justice non-profits and conducted research on caste and gender. I have lived across six cities and three countries, and my hometown is Kanpur, India.