I am an Assistant Professor of Politics and South Asian Studies at Seoul University (2025–). Until recently, I was an OSUN postdoctoral fellow at the European Central University’s Democracy Institute in Budapest (2024–25) as well as a non-resident research fellow at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris (2023–25). My prior appointments include a visiting scholarship at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University (2022–23) and a research fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University (2022-23). Prior to my tenure at Stanford, I co-headed the Politics and Society research division at the French research unit in India, the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH, UMIFRE 20 MEAE-CNRS) in New Delhi—2018–22. My dissertation, an ethnographic and archival study of student politics, questioned its contemporary significance in a rapidly declining Indian democracy.
My interdisciplinary work in political science and area studies is concerned with democratic representation in South Asia. I research populist discourses, youth activism, political professionalisation, digital media, and practices of the self in contemporary India. A more thorough overview of my research foci is accessible here. During my doctoral and postdoctoral years, I developed a strong expertise in combining computational and field-centric approaches. I build on this experience to research everyday political labor such as populist speech-making, media outreach, digital campaigning, and political brokerage. In addition to learning advanced methods of text analysis, data mining, and natural language processing, I specialize in corpus design, extraction, and compilation. In my new project, provisionally titled “The Languages of Democratic Decline in India,” I explore the effects of the populist rhetoric on democracy when it transitions to authoritarianism. As opposed to policymaking, narratives flaunted by politicians, media, and opinion-makers are often believed to be innocuous. Yet they shape citizens’ behaviors, manifest power relations, and construct the realities we live in. In a general sense, political language is paradoxical in a democracy: it can both enable and undermine it. Findings on the media and digital aspects of this research were published last year in Political Psychology and Global Policy.
Alongside my publication work, I build comprehensive archives of visual and written political material, including speeches and pamphlets from a variety of vernacular sources. I query them using a scholarly and activist eye, building increasingly on computational methods such as machine learning, text mining and qualitative text analysis. I pursue a range of interdisciplinary collaborations with field researchers, computer scientists and visual artists. These research avenues do not promote khichdi—mixed porridge—approaches, they aim instead at fostering an informed qualitative-quantitative dialogue within a single interpretive research framework. Growing on the roadsides of traditional publication formats, the content of this website can be understood as a curatorial enterprise in and of itself. I use the digital to showcase ethnographic, archival and geek-informed methodological insights from ongoing research on the political aspirations of the youth and the populist turn in South Asia. Here, political ethnography is complemented by discourse analysis and archival explorations in order to unveil the renewals and appraisals of representative mechanisms within democratic life, including populist mimesis among Indian leaders, declassing practices within left activism, student activists’ depression as a non-participatory stand, or biographical configuration of youth entering electoral arenas.
In continuity with current writing, this virtual space contributes to open access research and facilitates impactful public outreach. Before the pandemic of Covid-19 altered our ability to organise public events, I curated an archival exhibition on student politics in various venues in New Delhi, including the India Habitat Centre.
| >> Theme-wise, the website is organised as follows: Youth activism as political self-fashioning, Political archives and the pamphleteers, Populist style as political representation, Political intermediaries, elites and subalterns, Ethnography of everyday politics in India, Text analysis, speeches and lifeworlds. >> Content-wise, the following categories can be accessed: Publications, Collaborations, Datasets, Curation, Syllabi, Codes, Photography, E-library. >> More about the author: Curriculum vitae, Contact. |