Dr Poornima Paidipaty

Dr Poornima Paidipaty

Visiting Fellow

International Inequalities Institute

Languages
English, Spanish, Telugu
Key Expertise
History of inequality, South Asia, Technocracy, Economic history

About me

Poornima Paidipaty is a Lecturer in Comparative Political Economy at King's College London.  Her work explores the changing history of social and economic inequality, with a particular focus on South Asia. She is currently undertaking a major new research project examining the role of data in economic governance in postcolonial India.  She was previously an LSE Fellow in Inequalities. 

Poornima holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, an MA in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA in Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University. Drawing on her varied training, she believes strongly in the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of inequality, especially when it comes to recognizing and addressing the compounding overlaps between economic inequalities on the one hand and racialized and gendered hierarchies on the other.

Along with Pedro Ramos Pinto, she led an international research initiative exploring the history of measuring inequality (funded by the Philomathia Foundation and Cambridge University).  The project examined how measurements and indicators develop out of particular social and historical contexts and have lasting impacts on how we understand and tackle disparity. The outcome of the research was published in the journal, History of Political Economy and can be viewed here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/issue/52/3

Recent Publications

  • Trevisan, F., Vaughan, M. & Vromen, A. (2025). Story Tech: Power, Storytelling, and Social Change Advocacy. University of Michigan Press. 
  • Vaughan, M. & Schieferdecker, D. (2025), 'Seeing a New Type of Economic Inequality Discourse: Inequality as Spectacle in the “Billionaire Space Race”', International Journal of Communication, 19 (1), 348-369 
  • Vaughan, M., & Kerr, S. (2025). Visual representations of wealth inequality in political communication. Visual Communication.
  • Vaughan, M., Gruber, J. B., & Langer, A. I. (2025). The tension between connective action and platformisation: Disconnected action in the GameStop short squeeze. New Media & Society, 27(2), 632-654.