As a qualitative sociologist grounded in ethnographic sensibilities and a regional focus on South Asia and Africa- India encounters, my primary research and teaching interests include Southern urbanisms, migration, and law, bureaucracy, and the state. My scholarship has examined contemporary patterns of transnational mobility from the African continent, particularly West Africa, to Delhi, India, as an entry point to engage with questions of social difference and identity in relation to urban futures. I also have an interest in themes of  ‘informality’, ‘illegality’, and everyday experience(s) of law and state power as lived in the socio-legal urban margins.

My next project at the University of Tübingen will examine deportation, infrastructures, and policing by attending to the complex relationship between urban space, identity and identification for different subject populations located in Delhi, India. My interdisciplinary research trajectory thus aims to examine ‘new’ spaces and sociopolitical sites of Global Encounters and particularly the tensions and convergences emerging from hierarchized cultural, political, and socioeconomic encounters in the Global South.