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.

Photo-ethnography: Destruction and Reconstruction of Sacred Places

This photo-ethnography project traces the shifting religioscape of Ramu, Bangladesh, through the visual and lived aftermath of destruction and reconstruction. Focusing on the burning of Hindu and Buddhist sacred sites and their selective, tourism-driven rebuilding, the project documents how these transformations reshape not only religious spaces but also everyday practices, social relations, and ways of inhabiting the city.

Through photographs, the project attends to rubble—not as debris, but as a living archive. Broken statues, reconstructed temples, altered pathways, and absent sites become visual testimonies of loss, negotiation, and adaptation. Guided by the concepts of rubble and religioscape, the images map how destruction reverberates outward, reconfiguring networks of belief, memory, and belonging.

Building on long-term ethnographic engagement, the project foregrounds how communities live in and with these transformed landscapes. It captures the affective textures of ruination—grief, resilience, and quiet acts of continuity—while also documenting how reconstruction, often shaped by state and tourism agendas, produces new spatial hierarchies and exclusions. More than documentation, this photo-ethnography invites viewers to witness the afterlife of violence: how material remains carry memory, how absence speaks, and how communities reimagine their worlds amid rupture.

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.