My parents were typical post-1965 “model minority” immigrants from southern India to the United States. Growing up, I toggled the in-betweenness of being both Indian and American, of both benefitting from my family’s upper-caste, “honorary white” status and being on the receiving end of racism and xenophobia. This background inspired me to explore and engage these tensions that continue to pervade the South Asian American diaspora through my research, focusing on aspects of identity construction, discursive reproduction, and agency in South Asian Americans’ engagement with dominant discourses. Learning about and researching systems of power has therefore been an ongoing process of challenging the racism directed at and by the South Asian American community and of recognizing my own privilege.
However, these issues extend to communities beyond the South Asian American diaspora. My research has looked across cultural groups to explore how to build solidarity against white supremacy. I have explored constructions of brownness across Latinx and South Asian American immigrant communities and conceptualized the notion of critically reflexive racialization as a way for marginalized communities to engage in anti-racist discourse and interracial solidarity. Recent scholarship has also analyzed anti-racism/solidarity statements issued by communication programs across the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd and to the increase in anti-Asian violence, homophobic discourses in the Nigerian context, and acculturation experiences of undocumented immigrants.
Research Accomplishments
- Co-guest-edited a 2024 special issue of Communication Studies titled “Expanding upon critical methodologies and perspectives in Communication Studies”
- Published in a broad range of journals, including Communication, Culture & Critique, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Western Journal of Communication, Howard Journal of Communications, and Communication Studies
- Recipient of 10 top paper/panel awards from international, national, and regional conferences
Current/Future Projects
- a critical analysis of discourses of caste and casteism among American-born Desis
- a qualitative study about how former students of critical intercultural communication use what they have learned to promote social justice in their everyday lives
- an ethnographic study of the acculturation and racialization experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants in Turkey