Biography

Currently, I work as Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Wellbeing at United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain.

Prior to this, I worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani, Dubai. Also, I worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC funded research project at Sussex University and Goldsmiths, University of London. My post-doctoral research explored the relationship between childhoods, politics and public life by using qualitative, ethnographic, and longitudinal approach.

I received my Ph.D. in Social Policy from The University of Edinburgh in 2014. Before that, I had worked with civil society organizations, state/central governments and multilateral agencies as a development practitioner in India for about ten years. In particular, I directly worked with children after 2004 Tsunami: directed the implementation of community based psychosocial intervention programme for Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF-B) and provided consultation to a local NGO on children’s rights in the post-disaster context. I also worked with UNDP/Planning Commission on Strengthening State Plans for Human Development and several non-profit organizations on a range of social development and humanitarian issues such as education for all, child protection, disaster response and preparedness, decentralized human development planning, rights of the children living in the margins of the society, and caste and gender based discrimination.

I am specialized in inter-disciplinary research that contributes knowledge broadly to the domains of social theories, early years provision, social policy analysis, children’s rights and childhoods of the majority world. My current and previous research involved quantitative and qualitative approaches, extensive ethnographic fieldwork, creative methods, cross-cultural analysis and multi methods. Till date, I have published works mainly in the fields of sociology of childhood, political sociology, early years provision and children's rights.