Research Activities

A. Principal Investigator:

1. Ambivalent Activists: How Indian Tech Workers Organize as Citizens and Immigrants

Summary: 

Indian tech workers represent the largest group of tech labor receiving outsourced projects in their home country and migrating for offshore jobs on high-skilled visas to the United States. These workers face layoffs, overwork and other forms of precarity despite the privileges of high income. How do their privilege and precarity coexist, and how to they respond to this seeming paradox? How do they seek better rights at the workplace? In this multi-sited qualitative project conducted from 2020 to 2026, I used interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and virtual ethnography to answer my research questions. I have developed several novel concepts in this rsearch, including covert carcerality, ambivalent activism, and liminal informality. 

Output: 

One monograph from Stanford University Press (forthcoming).

Five peer-reviewed journal articles

Over twenty invited talks and conference presentations

2. Impacts of AI on Tech Jobs: Returnship, Skills and Identity

Work in progress

3. Immigrant Academic Workers

Work in progress

Research assistants: Wyla Solsbery (2024-2025); Isabella Acevedo (2025-present), Wake Forest University

B. Co-Principal Investigator:

1. Gender, Migration and Religion

Co-PI, with Bandana Purkayastha and Anjana Narayan (2023-present)

Summary: 

In this qualitative project, we study how diasporic engagements, including on social media, produce new discourses and identities of religion.

Funding: 

Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (amount: $7,000, 2023-2025)

Jack Shand Research Grant, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (amount: $5134, 2026-2027)

Research Assistant: Anubhab Pal (2026)

Output: 

Podcast series: Walking a Fine Line

Four peer reviewed articles and book chapters

One conference presentation