Sohini Kar is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on economic anthropology of South Asia, particularly urban India. Her work examines the impact of increasing financialization on poverty and development.
Dr Kar’s book, Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance from Stanford University Press was awarded the 2020 Bernard Cohn Book Prize for a first book on South Asia, sponsored by South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of commercial microfinance has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents.
In addition to her work on microfinance, Dr Kar has written about women in finance, and on India’s financial inclusion policy, and its relation to social welfare programmes. She is currently working on two projects: 1) financial activism and the ways in which non-financial actors engage finance as a space to enact social change; and 2) the impact of extreme heat on the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor in India.
Prior to joining LSE, Dr Kar held a postdoctoral position as Harvard College Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University between 2013-14. She holds an MA and PhD in Anthropology from Brown University, an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Economics and French from Columbia University.
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
- Forthcoming. Kar Sohini. The Financial Activist: Shareholding and the Inconvenience of Collective Ownership. Cultural Anthropology.
- 2023. Kar, Sohini. Domestic values: gendered labor and the uncanniness of critique in marketing life insurance for women. Journal of Cultural Economy, 17(3), 314–330.
- 2021. Schuster, Caroline and Sohini Kar. Subprime Empire: On the Inbetweeness of Finance. Current Anthropology. 62:4, 389-411.
- 2018. Kar, Sohini. ‘Securitizing Women: Gender, Precaution, and Risk in Indian Finance.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 43(2): 301-325.
- 2017. Kar, Sohini. ‘Austerity Welfare: Social Security in the Era of Finance.’ Anthropology Today, 33(5), 12-15.
- 2017. Kar, Sohini. ‘Relative Indemnity: Risk, Insurance, and Kinship in Indian Microfinance.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(2), 302-319.
- 2016. Kar, Sohini and Caroline Schuster. ‘Comparative Projects and the Limits of Choice: Ethnography and Microfinance in India and Paraguay.’ Journal of Cultural Economy. 9(4), 347-363.
- 2013. Kar, Sohini. ‘Recovering Debts: Microfinance Loan Officers and the Work of “Proxy-Creditors” in India.’ American Ethnologist, 40(3), 480-493.
Book Chapters
- 2021. Kar, Sohini. Consuming Credit: Microfinance and Making Consumer Markets at the Bottom of the Pyramid. In Donner, Henrike & Baswati Bhattacharya (Eds.) Globalising Everyday Consumption in India: History and Ethnography. London: Routledge.
- 2020. Kar, Sohini. Accumulation by Saturation: Welfare and Financial Inclusion in India. In Don Kalb and Chris Hann (eds.) Financialization: Relational Approaches. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Other Publications
- 2024 ‘Who Benefits? On Welfare and Accumulation.’ Commentary: Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South. Global Social Policy, 24, 2, 237-330.
- 2017. Kar, Sohini. ‘Crisis, Again: On Demonetization and Microfinance.’ Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, September 27.
- 2016. Kar, Sohini. ‘A Tale of Two Rooms: Debt, Success, and Freedom in Indian Microfinance.’ Allegra Lab, Nov. 2.