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.