Hello again from Dhaka! I wanted to share a bit of my findings in my final post for the Summer (which ended up actually being Fall — sorry Laura!!) I mentioned in my last post that there were two cyclones: Amphan and Yaas, that affected the Sundarbans during the first two years of the COVID-19 […]

In my previous update on my summer research project for CASI, I provided a critical review of scholarship on Latin American Orientalism and Mexican literary representations of the Orient, particularly India. I sketched out an updated outline of my chapter that attended to the question of Orientalism in Latin America and its roots in the […]

As I mentioned in my earlier posts, I was tying up some loose ends to my current empirical chapter during the summer. In this time I also went back to listen to some of the interviews I did last year in order to theorize more about the mechanisms that drive women’s political empowerment in the […]

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or NREGS, was established in 2005 as India’s flagship rural employment guarantee program. Under the program, households must apply for job cards which entitle them to 100 days of work per year. Wages are determined by each state and increases in the wage rate over the years […]

The past few weeks I’ve been preparing to finally head to Bangladesh and spend a few months doing research there this year, and I have learned on major lesson: fieldwork during a global pandemic takes an extraordinary amount of effort and determination. I was one of many people who were meant to begin fieldwork at […]

Hello again from Simran Rajpal! I’m currently interning for Safe Water Network, a nonprofit delivering reliable, affordable, and safe water to more than 500 communities throughout Ghana and India. Last blog, I discussed why water availability and sanitation are so vital to public and community health – specifically through the lens of women’s health and […]

Hello! This is my third and final blog update on the summer research I am conducting with Professor Ramya Sreenivasan. I am excited to conclude the work we have been doing together, as well as continue to support the research in the fall semester. Over the course of this summer, I have watched and developed […]

Over the past few months, I have been knee-deep in interview data that I am using for two dissertation chapters. My data primarily takes the form of transcripts from interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 which I analyze using the ATLAS.ti software. Each of these long transcripts was read multiple times during the initial process […]

At the start of the summer, I wanted to explore women’s political engagement in different nationally representative surveys in India and the India Human Development Survey seemed like a good starting place. While they have few questions on political participation, it’s generally difficult to find nationally representative surveys on public opinion and political participation in […]

In my first blog post at the start of the summer, I wrote about my aim to draft a chapter of my dissertation based on fieldwork conducted during the pandemic. As I started to outline this writing, I also noticed that several methodological questions were coming up for me again, particularly with regard to the […]