My primary research interest lies in bringing a sociological understanding to processes of social and economic development. And my methodological expertise is in the use of qualitative methods, including conducting interviews, case studies, and narrative analysis. Substantively, I am  interested in the interrelationships between culture, inequality,  economic development, and gender. Currently, I am conducting research and writing on the social impacts of microcredit programs on poor, rural women in developing countries, like India. Recently, these programs have been feted with the Nobel Peace Prize to one of its pioneers. However, there is a huge gap in the general understanding of whether and how these programs have their much-celebrated effect of economically and socially empowering women. There is a great dearth of sociological research on this subject, which contributes to the persistence of this gap even as microcredit programs are adopted as a major poverty-alleviation startegy in increasingly more continents and countries, which now include Asia, Africa, Latin America, the U.S., and Eastern Europe. I am exploring the questions: How, i.e. through what mechanisms, do microcredit programs empower women in the cases where they have this effect? Is it giving women exclusive access to uncollateralized loans that leads to this proclaimed outcome by remarkably transforming women into independent economic entrepreneurs? Or, is it the unanticipated mechanism of belonging to a non-kin, group-based network and participating in the groups’ associational life  that sets forth a series of unintended consequences, which lead to an overall improvement in women’s agency? An article based on this research has recently been published in the American Sociological Review. I am now working on a book manuscript, where I lay out the detailed findings of this research. These findings largely debunk the conventional, standard assumptions about how microcredit empowers women.

I am also involved in a collaborative project in which I am undertaking (along with my co-author) an analysis of political participation in grassroots democratic institutions in rural India. In this project we have large-scale qualitative data from four South Indian states (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala) on public discussions taking place in the gram sabha, or village councils, which meet two to four times a year, regarding local village-development issues and beneficiary-selection for the government’s anti-poverty programs. We are examining this rich body of data in the light of theories about the public sphere and deliberative democracy, an important and emerging field of interdisciplinary scholarship. An article from this project will soon be published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of  Political and Social Science.