Profile

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of gender, caste, queer Indigeneity and decolonial thought in South Asia, with a regional focus on Nepal and its borderlands. My core research contribution emerges from a four-year, multi-sited study of transnational LGBTI+ activism in Nepal which forms the basis of my forthcoming monograph. The book analyses how queer mobilisation is shaped by global health regimes, donor infrastructures, and regional circulations of ideas, resources, and activist expertise. It advances a new framework for understanding queer politics in the global South by theorising how governed intimacies, multi-scalar power and selective solidarities configure which queer subjects become visible, fundable and politically actionable. This work received the BNAC (Britain-Nepal Academic Council) PhD Dissertation Prize (2021). Articles from this research have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly and Culture, Health & Sexuality.

Building on this foundation, I now lead a growing research programme on queer Indigeneity and heritage-making in Nepal. Developed in collaboration with Indigenous researchers, artists and LGBTI+ activists, my current project examines the politics of caste and Indigeneity within queer organising, and the politics of gender and sexuality within Indigenous and Dalit organising. As part of the consortium, Heritage as Place-Making: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), I direct the project Queer Indigeneity and Heritage-Making in Nepal. Two publications - on Casteless Gender and Casteless Queer - have emerged from this work. In collaboration with an Indigenous artists' collective Artree Nepal, I have also authored a book chapter on 'Decoloniality, Indigeniety and Queerness in Nepal' (Sternberg Press/Para Site, forthcoming).

My research has been supported by the Swiss Government Excellence Research Fellowship (2021-2022) for my postdoctoral work at the University of Zurich; the College of Social Sciences Scholarship (2015-2019) for my doctoral research at the University of Glasgow; the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (2011-2012) at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, the Hague), Erasmus University; and multiple internal and external grants at the University of Glasgow and at Lancaster University.

Other projects include a co-authored book chapter documenting the #MeToo movement in Nepal, with a focus on the complicities of higher education insitutions within and outside the country (University of Colorado Press, forthcoming); a study of male migrant identities as dependents of highly skilled female workers in the UK for the project Invisible Boy: The making of contemporary masculinities (Umeå University); and research on gendered nationalism and ethnic exclusion within the feminist campaign for equal citizenship rights for Nepali women (in Bodies in Resistance, Palgrave Macmillan).

I also have experience of working with various third sector and development organisations. I serve on the Executive Committee of the Britain-Nepal Academic Council and as an Advisory Member of Indigenous Without Borders, Nepal. I have acted as a country expert in UK legal proceedings, where my reports have contributed substantively to judicial understandings of caste, Indigeneity, gender-based violence and queer marginalisation in Nepal.

At Lancaster, my pedagogical practice is informed and strengthened by my research expertise. I currently teach on SOCL913 Gender, Sex and Bodies; SOCL314 Feminism and Social Change; GEN101 Gender Studies; and SOCL201 Skills in Researching Social and Cultural Lives. I welcome PhD supervision across gender and sexuality studies, caste and Indigeneity, social movements and decolonial and postcolonial thought. I am also open to projects on transnational activism, development, and South Asian or Himalayan studies, particularly those employing interdisciplinary, comparative, ethnographic or participatory approaches.