My research expertise bridges several core fields of study: Sikh/Punjab diaspora studies; African and South Asian/diaspora studies; Uganda Studies; Afro-Asianism, Indian Oceanic and global south studies;  transnational, postcolonial and intersectional feminisms; critical racial and religious studies, gender and sexuality; critical university studies.

Current Projects:

The intersections of Sikh Studies and Anthropology. At UCI , I am developing a critical interdisciplinary framework for the development of Sikh Studies in relation to the discipline of anthropology in core thematic research areas. Please see “Sikh Studies at UCI” for more information. In addition to publications on Sikh Studies and anthropology, I am currently working on two projects:

1.) Sikh Feminisms: Postcolonial, Intersectional and Transnational Approaches (Two-Year Working Group 2020-2022)

2.) Sikhs in California, Sikh Studies and the UC System (UCHRI RRG on “Disciplining Diversity” Fall 2020)

See “Sikh Studies at UCI” for more information.

Ongoing Projects:

Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transregional Uganda. I critique the expectations of liberal normative citizenship, political practice, and political subjectivity through ethnographic engagement with shifting norms of global and state sovereignty and governance, state and community-based citizenship and racial projects, transnational migration, and the localized dynamics of urban cross-racial, religious, ethnic, gendered and sexual interactions to invoke new understandings of nonliberal modes of belonging and community-building in an East African/Indian Ocean landscape of South Asian racial exclusion and racial privilege. Moreover, I unpack the exceptionality of the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians to reframe it as a critical event that highlights the crisis of African decolonization and nationalisms, the construction of the problem of “African-Asian relations”,  the native indigenous/immigrant Other binary in African Studies/Africanist scholarship, and the occlusion of race and Africa in South Asia/diaspora studies. I explore these processes in relation to contemporary Africa Rising narratives/Africa-Asia geopolitical trends, thinking through Afro-Asianism more broadly, as well as the radical Continental, transnational/diasporic, and Pan-Africanist scholarly traditions in African Studies. I am concerned with building intellectual frameworks across African and South Asia/diaspora studies, including intersections of race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality politics and practices.

Previous Research Projects: 

Developing transnational feminist frameworks from the Global South that de-centers Americanist approaches. See publications for further info.

The study of the university in the US and in Global South contexts-especially the politics of diversity and decolonization. I have researched and written about critical ethnographic approaches to diversity and decolonization in anthropology and in the university in the context of affirmative action roll-back in the U.S.; specifically at the U of M and in the UC system. I have also explored the decolonizing university in the Ugandan context. See publications for further info.