Dr Komal Chauhan

Komal is a Research Officer in South Asian Ethnography in the Leverhulme Trust-funded project 'Reputation and the Reproduction of Social Inequality' (Rep2SI) (https://rep2si.github.io/) in the Department of Methodology. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Her doctoral research is an in-depth analysis of labour relations involving lower-caste women in sugarcane farming in North India. She was also a DAAD visiting PhD research scholar at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany.

Research interests

Komal's broad research interests lie at the intersection of political economy and socio-cultural studies, particularly focusing on agrarian change, debt bondage, and labour relations in rural India. She is intrigued by how economic transformations and socio-political dynamics shape and are shaped by caste and gender relations within rural communities. In her PhD thesis, Komal develops a nuanced approach to understanding the mechanisms of construction of everyday vulnerability of Dalit women agricultural labourers through patriarchal restrictions, debt bondage and the entry of neoliberal forms of credit in the countryside. She also explores the individual and collective resistance of Dalit women against capitalist exploitation designed along the institutions of caste and patriarchy. Her regional focus is rural India, where she spent 11 months conducting ethnographic research from 2019 to 2020. Her PhD is grounded in ethnography and village-level surveys. She is currently undergoing training in social network analysis for the ongoing project Rep2Si.