I research, write, and teach about the body in the world, attending closely to how ideas of normalcy circulate through and come to shape our everyday lives. My research agenda is shaped by my interdisciplinary training - as an anthropologist and before that, as a statistician - and by my commitment to sustaining  community through my work.

How do embodied experiences come to be made into data? My first book project, Quantifying the Body: Disability, Data, and Governance in Urban India, draws on my doctoral dissertation to understand who comes to be legally counted as disabled. I look at how disability as a category is enumerated and identified in India, which is usually through an evaluation resulting in a disability percentage. I do so by following two forms of identity documentation -- the paper-based disability certificate and the digital unique ID card -- where the body is central as data. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, my work foregrounds the perspectives of disabled people and communities in attending to the stakes of political recognition. Through Quantifying the Body, I demonstrate that disabled citizenship is often a state of being in flux and that disability certification is a process through which ideas of normalcy, belonging and citizenship are made and re-made.

I have presented this work at a range of venues, including annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the Association of American Geographers, the Annual Conference on South Asia, the NorthEast Human Computer Interaction meeting, and others.

Among other things, my research is guided by what I term “disability as orientation” to research and to the world. Drawing from a rich body of writing on disability justice, my scholarship is a meditation on staying with a disability as a topic, method, praxis, and life itself. For a selection of writing that has emerged from this orientation, please see the public-facing section of my Writings page.

The multidisciplinary nature of my work has also been shaped by my training and work experience -- I have an M.S.Ed. in Statistics, Measurement, Assessment and Research Technologies and a certificate in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. I also have an Ed. M. in International Education Policy from Harvard University and a B.S.F.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Prior to beginning my position at Brown, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. And before beginning my doctoral program, I worked in monitoring and evaluation, early childhood development, and as a K-12 educator.