I work at the intersection of politics and public policy. I ask questions about knowledge production, AI, expertise, policy making, and right-wing mobilisation in the US, UK and India. Two key questions guide my research:
How do notions of expertise shift during moments of political and technological transformation?
How does this affect the power (material, institutional, and discursive) to produce legitimate knowledge and make key decisions around democratic futures?
I am an Assistant Professor/Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia, UK. My book, The New Experts was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. My work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Political Ideologies, as well as featured in national and international outlets, including TIME Magazine, BBC, Tech Policy Press, The Conversation and The Wire.
Prior to this position, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Policy and Governance at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and a New Generation Network Scholar at the Australia India Institute. Parallel to my independent research, I led a research project in 2021 funded by the Immigrant Learning Center and the Institute for Immigrant Research examining the policy neglect experienced by immigrant essential workers in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I received my Ph.D from the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2020, where I was a Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. I hold an M.A in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, a B.A in English Literature from the University of York, and several years of work experience in policy research and evaluation.