Journal articles
Students Matter: Comparative Reflections on Decolonial Pedagogy in Political Science
With Dean Caivano. Journal of Political Science Education 22(3), 2026. Read the article
We compare teaching in three very different settings: an elite US university, a women’s university in India, and two California state prisons. We show how race, caste, gender, and incarceration shape what happens in the classroom. We argue that decolonial teaching is not a set of best practices. It has to be adjusted again and again to unequal institutions and to students’ actual lives.
How Civil Society in India Is Marginalized: Civic Space as Relational Process
With Margit van Wessel and Rita Manchanda. Journal of Civil Society 21(3): 237–255, 2025. Open access. Read free
Shrinking civic space is usually treated as a fixed limit on civil society. Drawing on 36 interviews with state and civil society actors in India, we treat it instead as something made in their everyday dealings with each other. The state sidelines civil society in three ways: delegitimizing it, displacing it, and repurposing it for its own ends. Even so, civil society organizations keep finding political roles, depending on the situation.
Faith-Based Organizations and Religious Nationalism
With B. Rajeshwari, Farhat Naz, Sumita Pahwa, and Margit van Wessel. Politics and Religion, 2025. Open access. Read free
Based on interviews with 34 faith-based organizations from five religious traditions, we ask how they work under a Hindu nationalist government. Their views and strategies share much in common. They also differ based on their tradition’s place in Indian society. Whether the state marginalizes or favors a community shapes whether its organizations cooperate with the state, confront it, or keep their distance.
Negotiating Autonomy in Capacity Development: Addressing the Inherent Tension
With B. Rajeshwari and Margit van Wessel. World Development 134: 105046, 2020. Open access. Read free
Capacity-building programs aim to create autonomous agents, but they often start from outsiders’ view of what participants lack. We propose “narrative autonomy” as a way to see how telling their own stories helps women interpret their own situation and act on it. The case is a program run by a Delhi feminist organization and seven partners in Jharkhand for women elected to village councils. Informal relationships and formal training worked together to strengthen these women’s autonomy.
Religion, Nationalism, and Gender: Perspective from South Asia
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 7(4): 873–887. Published online 2020. Read the article
Debates over women and religion in South Asia are often read as religious fundamentalism. I argue that they are really about postcolonial nationalism. At stake is the definition of the nation, not the religious community’s attitudes towards women. Short cases from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka show how their struggles to reach a secular settlement have centered on women’s roles and how to interpret them.
The Politics of Education in Afghanistan
Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan 21(1): 1–28, 2014. Abstract (Gale)
The biggest gain from the post-2001 intervention was the sharp rise in school enrollment, especially for girls. Yet schools have also come under attack, because war and empire turned them into symbols of governments many see as illegitimate. I weigh these gains against poor educational quality and ongoing insecurity, and I argue for guarded optimism about the infrastructure built for girls’ schooling. (This is a paper that takes normative positions that I have come to question in more recent years.)
Indian Women Activists and Transnational Feminism over the Twentieth Century
Journal of Women’s History 24(4): 149–174, 2012. Read the article
Indian feminists have taken part in global feminist networks for a century, and in itself has not been problematic. Early on, the exchange was about ideas and people. More recently, reliance on foreign funding has redirected the movement’s priorities. After the 1993 Vienna conference, for example, violence against women became the main focus in India, even though activists wanted to take on economic policy. I argue that it is funding and the power of dependency that influence Indian feminist agendas, not simply engagement across borders.
Running From Elections: Indian Feminism and Electoral Politics
India Review 11(1): 46–64, 2012. Read the article
India’s first wave of feminism worked through electoral politics. The second wave turned away from party politics. Tracing this history, I show that women’s early victories depended on party politics, and that staying outside the electoral arena weakened the autonomous women’s movement. The article also points to ways the movement could re-engage with parties and leaders.
Women, Work, Violence and the Neo-Liberal Moment
Review essay. Contemporary South Asia 19(4): 465–470, 2011. Read the article
This essay reviews three books on violence against women and on labor organizing in South Asia. It argues that neoliberalism shifted progressive politics away from labor organizing and toward NGO campaigns against social harms. Resistance now needs a language that joins feminist and labor analysis.
Structure and Strategies: Two Faces of Civic Activism in India
Journal of Civil Society 3(2): 137–157, 2007. Read the article
I compare a religious nationalist movement with the women’s movement in India. The difference in their success comes down to organization. Women’s groups rarely coordinated their missions and strategies, so the movement looked weak. The tightly coordinated religious nationalist movement used its resources to change Indian society.
Is Neo-liberalism Bad for Women?
Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 23(1): 35–41, 2006. Read free (PDF)
Is Globalization Our Friend? Women’s Allies in the Developing World
Current History 105(689): 105–111, 2006. Read the article
I separate globalization from domestic neoliberal policy and argue that reforms tied to global economic integration clearly benefit the most vulnerable women in developing countries.
Book chapters
The Rhetoric of Productivity: Narratives of Academic Mothers Who Choose to Homeschool
With Heidi Williams, Abby Arnold-Patti, Cecilia Parnther, and Laura Seroka. In Blurred Boundaries: Women and Gendered Labor in a Post-2020 Economy, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Jessica McCrary. University of South Carolina Press, 2026.
Religious Nationalism
In The Sage International Encyclopedia of Politics and Gender, edited by L. Roberts. Sage, 2025. Read the entry
This entry explains how religious nationalism, which defines the nation by its religious identity, intersects with gender politics. Of the three main schools of thought on nationalism (modernist, primordialist, and constructivist), the constructivist view is the most useful: religious nationalism is deliberately built by identity entrepreneurs who remix familiar religious language and rituals for nationalist ends. Religious communities were long transnational and in tension with nation-states. In colonized regions, though, religious organization was one of the few spaces for autonomy, so anticolonial movements often blended religion and nationalism. Since the late 1970s, from Iran’s revolution to today’s populist movements, religious nationalism has returned in repeated waves.
What sets religious nationalism apart from secular nationalism is its focus on controlling gender: women’s roles, dress, and choices. Four cases show this: debates over the veil in France, “love jihad” conspiracy theories in India, abortion politics in the United States, and anti-LGBT laws in Russia. Gender debates are the flashpoint where religious nationalism claims the state’s authority to define national identity.
Performing Leadership: Gender and Populism in India
With B. Rajeshwari. In Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia: Past and Present, edited by Shweta Singh and Amena Mohsin. Routledge India, 2024. Read the chapter
We argue that populism is a masculine way of holding power and that it strengthens patriarchy, even when a woman performs it. Women populists differ mainly in using family language and stressing chastity. Only hypersexualized male leaders can also play caring, nurturing roles. Populists use sexuality, connection, and gender identity to present themselves as pure and familial, in contrast to a corrupt elite. The chapter covers national and state-level populism in India.
A Feminist Approach to Collaboration: A Sex Workers’ Network in India
With B. Rajeshwari and Margit van Wessel. In Reimagining Civil Society Collaborations in Development: Starting from the South. Routledge, 2023. Open access. Read free
This chapter studies a partnership between a sex workers’ network and a Delhi-based feminist human rights organization. The feminist partner’s attention to intersectionality, positionality, and marginalized voices narrowed the power gap between the participants in the network. That let the sex workers set their own advocacy goals, and it strengthened the case for treating sex work as a choice owed respect and dignity.
Introduction: Postsecular Feminisms
In Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context, 1–16. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. See the book page
Hinduism and Democracy: Religion and Politicized Religion in India
With Rina Verma Williams. In Routledge Handbook of Politics in Asia, edited by Shiping Hua. Routledge, 2018. Read the chapter
India has remained a stable democracy despite its Hindu majority, but the 2014 victory of the Hindu nationalist BJP raises hard questions about religion and democratic government. We argue for two distinctions. Hinduism, a religion, must be separated from Hindu nationalism, a political ideology. And the politicization of religion is not inevitable: it is built deliberately, through strategic mobilization over time.
Looking at women’s roles in Hindu nationalist campaigns such as the Ayodhya movement, we show how a gender lens reveals how contingent and constructed Hindu nationalist politics is. The approach helps explain how religion becomes politicized at particular moments, and what strategies might counter such movements.
