Hello and Jai Bhim!

I am an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Communication & Journalism. I recently graduated from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication & Technology, and a graduate portfolio in African and African Diaspora Studies.

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.