https://www.snehanna.com/blog daily 0.75 2020-12-23 https://www.snehanna.com/blog/balcony monthly 0.5 2021-10-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1608725539057-XZG4DF19NO1BC78JNEYX/IMG_9276.jpg Blog - Balcony view https://www.snehanna.com/blog/serendipity monthly 0.5 2020-08-11 https://www.snehanna.com/blog/cyclonecomic monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://www.snehanna.com/blog/blog-post-title-stuck monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://www.snehanna.com/blog/tharoorasaurus monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596684214513-1BDB7WP1JBB14IF8BL29/tharoor-amul-tweet-759-twiiter.jpg Blog - <strong>Get me a tharoorasaurus</strong> Amul’s ad. Image from: The Indian Express https://www.snehanna.com/blog/blog-post-title-four-23byz monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://www.snehanna.com/home daily 1.0 2025-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/55576cb5-2ef7-48cc-81a3-919cb5359e04/IMG_7723.jpeg Home I am a qualitative sociologist and I specialize in ethnographic methods. My research interests include urbanization, governance, class relations, and gender in contemporary India. I currently am Assistant Professor of Sociology and South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore. https://www.snehanna.com/teaching daily 0.75 2025-09-10 https://www.snehanna.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-08-06 https://www.snehanna.com/research daily 0.75 2025-09-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596764540035-40IZCLZ4VL1IGKYY17XV/F6149814-F8AD-4FD3-B57A-941CD8A46374.jpg Research - On the Move: the politics of driving in urban India Rapid increase in vehicle ownership in India since the early 1990s has been accompanied by severe traffic congestion and an increasing incidence of road accidents. Currently, India has the highest rate of traffic fatalities and injuries in the world. In response to this public health emergency, state agencies and local NGOs in low- and middle-income countries like India have been attempting to regulate road traffic and improve driving behavior using a variety of punitive techniques, persuasive strategies, and infrastructural changes. However, there has been little research on how these laws are implemented, how the low-level state functionaries tasked with implementing those laws address traffic management and how drivers themselves navigate both the laws and the traffic it is supposed to regulate. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst motorists and state officials in the southern Indian metropolis of Hyderabad, I examine how, when, and why state-led disciplinary interventions make sense to Hyderabadi drivers. In doing this, I unpack not just whether driving behavior actually changes, but also the kinds of narratives, imaginations, and practices that accompany the very idea of modernity, development, and progress. I show how the seemingly mundane and unremarkable act of driving around is a key site at which political selves, sensibilities and practices are generated in India. Keywords: urban; ethnography; South Asia; governance; transport This project was conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation research. I am currently working my dissertation into a book manuscript. Click here for an extended abstract of my dissertation project. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/f77d58b7-5a47-4022-a697-4068b224aca2/Figure+2.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596762765243-EM3EP1369HHX8C49ZP0T/SHANTAN.jpg Research - Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions: Gender, Class, and Cabs in Hyderabad, India A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet, we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. In this paper, I investigate how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared space of the car ride within the broader context of growing public anxiety around women’s safety in the city. Drawing on interview data and participant observation, I show two empirical patterns: one, women commuters and men cabdrivers view each other through the lens of suspicion as relatively more powerful than themselves; and two, while women construct men drivers as sexually rapacious and dangerous, men understand the upwardly mobile woman commuter as entitled and abusive of her class power. Ultimately, I argue that competing understandings of safety exacerbates social distance between men drivers and women commuters. I conclude by demonstrating that desire for safety vocalized by upwardly mobile women rests on processes of exclusion that worsen class relations in the city. Keywords: gender; South Asia; urban; class; transport; sexual violence For the full paper, email me. For a short version of this paper, please click here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/f60adcdc-0b21-402b-8c2c-07845859b618/IMG_3650.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/3f84c28f-06a4-434f-bb15-f2493c013c6d/IMG_0437.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/fb2cbea8-8f91-479c-b996-17c3df859f92/roadsides_cover_009-scaled.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596762977420-DO39Y95SC9J0215YXW90/original.jpg Research - “Where Do All The Lovers Go?” The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950-2005) Public expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural‐political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspaper and show how the figure of the ‘kissing couple’ became an important entity in larger discussions about the state of urban development, the role of pleasure in the city, and the imagination of a “modern” Mumbai. Keywords: urban; gender; public space; social control; India. This article was published in the Journal of Historical Sociology. Click here to access. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596764013443-BCUTVGDAAZX3LEOLFM7F/flower-1460889_1280.jpg Research - Consuming wellness, producing difference: The case of a wellness center in India Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of “self-care” regimes and “body projects” in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western contexts is instructive to a very large extent, the local particularities of consumption experiences in non-Western contexts require contextualized empirical research in order to better inform modern theories of consumption. This article is a study of a wellness center in the South Indian city of Chennai. Using ethnographic methods, I attempt to unpack the experience of consuming wellness in a space that ostensibly claims to remedy the ills of modern living while doing so in a culturally traditional and “Indian” manner. I show how the experiences of predominantly middle-class consumers here are dictated not by a sentimental attachment to tradition or locality, but by a vocabulary of speaking that primarily favors a language of consumer choice and rational decision-making. Whether or not that is the case, the way in which consumption of an “Indian” brand of wellness occurs demonstrates the stronghold of the language of consumer choice making the space at the wellness center a performative arena for self-identity formation to occur. Keywords: consumption; wellness; urbanity; identity; India This article was published in the Journal of Consumer Culture. Click here to access. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596120038353-KOOI2Y9GYYXX0YL8FN9S/Screen+Shot+2019-09-27+at+9.47.48+PM.png Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596120081208-GKET238TB9YGFPV58D5F/IMG_9393.JPG Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596120370256-Y28OCGYL3UZM9TQTEQTL/fullsizeoutput_d48.jpeg Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596121380318-ZQ7IMVSE06FW4S75F19X/2F2660C6-0B8E-4010-BCFC-601970F8FB79.jpg Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596120195192-OP1XZXY7RCIBE66OZQK1/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+9.33.06+PM.png Research https://www.snehanna.com/pagebio daily 0.75 2025-09-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596765072222-0BAHJVYK77ZXWNQF8KEO/image.PNG About Me I am currently Assistant Professor of Sociology and South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore. I was, prior to this, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale NUS College. I have a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, and a MA in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. As a qualitative sociologist by training, my aspirations and inspirations as a researcher are motivated by a commitment to critically thinking through the seemingly banal “everyday”. I use an ethnographic sensibility to explore how new technologies of social control in rapidly urbanizing India are enmeshed in gender and class politics. In my academic research, I have examined state-citizen relations through the lens of road safety; the politics of women’s safety in taxicabs in Hyderabad; the impact of COVID-19 on migrant cabdrivers; the historical evolution of middle-class attitudes towards public kissing in Mumbai; how ideologies of good citizenship are embodied in gendered consumption practices at wellness centers in Chennai; the intersectional exclusions of in-vitro fertilization technologies; and the politics of honor killings in India. This work has appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Area, Social Problems, Social Change, Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Consumer Culture, the Journal of Developing Societies, and Economic and Political Weekly. In my public writing, I have written about ethnographic research as a gendered and sexualized practice; how women drivers in Hyderabad “have fun” in the highly masculinized profession of autorickshaw driving; how upper-class women travel in taxicabs in the context of panics around women’s safety in cabs; the possibilities and pleasures of women using Instagram; and on youth masculinities in small towns in neoliberalizing India. Some of this writing can be found on Public Books, Economic and Political Weekly, Agents of Ishq, StandArt, and The Wire. Find my writing here. Teaching has been integral to my growth as a scholar and researcher. The courses I teach — and have taught — at National University of Singapore, Yale-NUS College, and at the University of Chicago have contributed immensely to my own research and intellectual development. I have taught undergraduate courses such as “Issues in State and Society”, “Gender in the City”, “Urban Theory”, “Gender in South Asia”, “Modern Social Theory”, “Self, Culture, and Society” and “Digital Ethnography”. I have also given guest lectures in courses on transportation, qualitative methods, and gender studies. I have also advised undergraduate and graduate students at both Yale-NUS College and NUS. I have supervised honors thesis with topics ranging from gender and urban infrastructure to memory and urban planning to thermal inequality. I am also currently supervising two doctoral theses — one, on gender and environmental crisis in India; and two, on transgender mobilities in urban India. I have also examined a PhD thesis on disability and Indian cinema, and have served on the dissertation proposal committees at NUS, University of Nevada-Reno, and Rutgers University. I believe in doing the work of making academic writing accessible to a wider public. In that sense, I think of myself as doing the work of intellectual translation. To this end, not only have I published several book reviews but I also am a regular host on the New Books Network podcast. In my tryst with research, doing the work of public writing and intellectual translation has been the most satisfying and rewarding experience. I am also the co-founder and co-editor of Ethnographic Marginalia, a website that features writing and conversations around ethnographic practice. For more, visit www. ethnomarginalia.com https://www.snehanna.com/new-books-network daily 0.75 2025-10-27 https://www.snehanna.com/writing daily 0.75 2025-11-05 https://www.snehanna.com/creativewriting daily 0.75 2020-08-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596397591708-YSRH26R683AW3FS84BE3/IMG_0437.JPG creative-writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1589847896972-M6Z43LS56WX5T1S74A5I/image-asset.jpeg creative-writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21cb041de3ab59bf76c699/1596396998151-D9WWBSJOY6GN6O8NBDUK/Picture1.png creative-writing https://www.snehanna.com/hideandseek daily 0.75 2020-08-02 https://www.snehanna.com/ethno-marginalia daily 0.75 2020-12-05 https://www.snehanna.com/pagecv daily 0.75 2025-09-10