My Research

My research begins not with questions alone, but with conversations. It grows from shared meals, from stories told in kitchens and courtyards, from silences that speak as much as words. Community is not the backdrop of my work — it is its center. I see anthropology as a weaving together of voices, where knowledge is created in partnership and meaning arises through connection. In this way, my research is less about observing from the outside and more about walking alongside, learning together, and honoring the worlds we build in common.

I believe scholarship should not remain bound in books or behind walls, but move outward, living in the streets, classrooms, and public conversations it hopes to illuminate. My work, then, is both community-centered and public-facing: built in collaboration, and carried back to the very worlds that gave it life.

Social Lives of Infrastructure

Infrastructure constitutes the vital material networks through which we live, move, and envision our futures. It is not merely technical system but is central to the social, economic, and political fabric of urban life and deeply shape how people inhabit, experience, and imagine space. The project emerges from the recognition of the urgent need to examine the complexity and precarity of neighborhood infrastructure—small-scale, distributed systems upon which everyday urban livelihoods, safety, and social meaning increasingly depend. Despite the critical role that infrastructure plays in shaping everyday life, existing scholarship has been dominated by quantitative approaches that often overlook how ordinary people perceive, interpret, and navigate these networks in their daily routines.

Focusing on infrastructure deserts — marked by chronic neglect, inequitable distribution, or systemic absence of essential infrastructure — the project examines how uneven development of infrastructure impacts, reshapes, and reconfigures the everyday lives of low-income urban communities in the United States.

Infrastructural deserts are frequently located in neighborhoods inhabited by those with the least economic and political resources. As a result, these deserts intensify preexisting disparities by shaping uneven patterns of vulnerability and resilience across urban space. This project examines how infrastructure shapes our capacity to connect or withdraw, to feel rooted or unsettled, visible or overlooked, secure or vulnerable, and supported or compromised in health.

Employing interdisciplinary methods—including transect walks, in-depth interviews, participatory community mapping, social network surveys, and GIS-based spatial analysis (e.g., ArcGIS Survey123)—the research examines how neighborhood infrastructure influences communities’ daily lives, survival strategies, wellbeing, and collective resilience. It also attends to the priorities, expectations, and aspirations communities hold for the places they call home. Ultimately, the project aims to inform the creation of resilient cities by promoting equitable, community-informed infrastructure development.

Destruction and Reconstruction of Sacred Places

This research examined urban spatial disparities by investigating how the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist religious sites and the state-led, tourism-driven reconstruction of exclusively Buddhist sacred spaces have reshaped religious practices, social relationships, and spatial strategies in Ramu, a city in Bangladesh. Employing analytical frameworks of Rubble and Religioscape, I explore how the social impact of both destruction and selective reconstruction extends beyond the immediate sacred site, catalyzing the transformation of the broader religioscape—the networks of religious nodes, material objects, social ties, and ritual practices embedded within these sacred spaces.

Building on my dissertation, my book project interrogates the disruptions enacted through the process of destruction, the urban landscape reconstructed through the erasure of rubble, and the ways in which ruination—encompassing both demolition and reconstruction—reshapes the material and social conditions of the city and the lived realities of its inhabitants.

The value of this research extends beyond documenting how devastation reshapes physical terrain; it also examines the affective reconfigurations that emerge in its wake, tracing how loss, memory, and resilience are inscribed into landscapes. By attending to the afterlife of rubble, the project reveals how material remnants are not inert debris but active participants in shaping social worlds—bearing witness to rupture, embodying grief, and opening possibilities for renewal and reimagination.

Invisible Margins

This research examines the spatial strategies developed by Indigenous women in response to state-led pressures such as land acquisition, deforestation, and tourism-driven displacement. These strategies are not framed merely as resistance but as creative and enduring ways of negotiating presence, belonging, and continuity in landscapes under pressure. By centering Indigenous women’s perspectives, the research highlights how their spatial practices reconfigure relationships between people, land, and state authority, while also offering broader insights into how communities navigate precarity and reimagine futures through place-making.