Teaching

My teaching spans a variety of settings where I have worked with students from diverse backgrounds at Cornell University, University of Puget Sound and with Prison education programs in correctional facilities in New York and Washington state. I use multimodal approaches to cater to diverse learners with audio-visual methods in course content and activities. Opportunities for group work, collective note-taking and non-linear modes of reflection enable students to gain confidence and find their own voices, particularly when they are unaccustomed to methods of authoritative claim-making and argumentation often prioritized in academic settings.

I teach and design courses in Anthropology and Feminist Studies with specialization in carceral studies, political and legal anthropology and a regional focus in South Asia. I have taught introductory and upper level courses including a first year writing seminar in anthropology at Cornell, and courses in Crime, Law and Justice Studies at Puget Sound. Additionally I have mentored students and supervised undergraduate research projects.

Course Descriptions

Collage art by students at the University of Puget Sound Fall 2025

Global Prisons and Confinement

Prisons worldwide are widely acknowledged as institutions that impose strict limits on individual autonomy and mobility. Yet people’s freedoms are regulated through spatial and disciplinary technologies that exceed the prison. This course will explore how prisons and carceral systems are interconnected and operate globally. We will ask questions such as why are young women in India’s university hostels subject to routine surveillance and “curfew” hours? How do checkpoints and borders shape everyday living in Occupied territories? To explore these we will look at how technologies of surveillance, bodily regulation, time, and labor popularly associated with the prison are exported to different domains of our everyday lives. And how families, communities, and institutions engage, embrace, resist, and reinvent these technologies from a cross-cultural and dynamic perspective. We pay particular attention to how they interact with structures of caste, and race and differentially impact people across a range of institutional and intimate sites such as psychiatric institutions, homes, and neighborhoods.

Law, Gender and Justice in South Asia

In this course we will explore important dialogues in south asian and transnational feminism to address:

1) specific laws and the mark they leave on intimate and familial life 2) trace how social movements, and struggles for justice in South Asia and its diasporas bring people together in dialogue with, and in resistance to law 3) how such resistance and activism is gendered 4) the informal negotiations and alternate approaches to conflict resolution adopted in contexts where legal institutions are peripheral to everyday life, inaccessible or hostile. We will go beyond the formal understanding of capital letter Law, to unpack how law is practiced, experienced and contested in everyday life.

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