Dissertation Title: Precarious Relations: Household, Neighborhood, and Informal Work in the Global South
Committee: Marco Garrido (Chair); Kimberly Kay Hoang ; Smitha Radhakrishnan (Wellesley College)

My dissertation investigates the lived experiences of informal economy workers in Gurugram, a rapidly transforming city in India’s National Capital Region. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the project examines how working-class households navigate precarious livelihoods, gendered care responsibilities, and shifting infrastructures of urban life. Anchored in debates on social reproduction and urban informality, the dissertation foregrounds the household and neighborhood as constitutive sites where labor, precarity, and governance intersect. By tracing how workers and families negotiate cycles of crisis and adaptation, it contributes to scholarship on gender, migration, and urban inequality in the Global South.