APPOINTMENTS
Assistant Professor, Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences
Joint Appointment, Criminology, Law and Society, School of Social Ecology
Faculty Associate, Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
EDUCATION
New York University
PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, 2017
The University of Chicago
MA in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), 2007
Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India
MA in Sociology, 2005
Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, India
BA (Honors) in Journalism, 2003
AWARDS
American Institute for Indian Studies, Joseph W. Elder Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences 2024
UCI School of Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award 2023
UCI Womxn Center for Success Academic Achievement Award 2022
UCI Hellman Fellowship Award for early career faculty research, 2021-22, to support the completion of my book manuscript, “Immoral Traffic:” An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India.
UCI School of Social Sciences Dean’s Honoree Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, UCI Celebration of Teaching 2021
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
As an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia, my research spans postcolonial law, state practices, courts, policing, sexuality and governance, critical approaches to human rights and humanitarianism, NGOs and transnational activism, sex work, sex trafficking, labor and migration, regimes of care and carcerality, domestic work, child labor, orphanhood in global contexts, and critical childhood studies.
My interdisciplinary research, based on ethnographic methods and socio-legal analyses and rooted in critical feminist and postcolonial perspectives, is structured around two broad concerns:
1. How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge to imagine prostitution through the contrasting lenses of victimhood and immorality.
2. How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global humanitarian campaigns converge to imagine childhood as a category of vulnerability.
MEDIA APPEARANCES
I contributed to the UCI School of Social Sciences’ post on National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
I discussed my favorite teaching moments and the challenges of remote teaching and learning during the pandemic as part of the UCI Celebration of Teaching 2021:
I discussed my research and teaching interests in this introductory video when I joined UCI in 2018.
I spoke to Anthropology TV about my research at the 2013 AAA meetings in Chicago.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
“Immoral Traffic:” An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society.
PRINT PUBLICATIONS
(Part of a Special Issue on the Regulation of Sex Work in South Asia)
(Part of a symposium on New Directions in Legal Anthropology).
(Part of a Special Issue on Human Trafficking: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts).
ONLINE PUBLICATIONS
Co-authored with Kimberly Walters, “A Recipe for Injustice: India’s New Trafficking Bill Expands a Troubled Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Repatriation Framework,” Open Democracy, July 30, 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/kimberly-walters-vibhuti-ramachandran/recipe-for-injustice-india-s-new-trafficking-bil
In “Critical Reflections on Raid and Rescue Operations in New Delhi” for Open Democracy, I explore the complexity of anti-trafficking rescue operations, as a counter-narrative to mainstream representations:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/vibhuti-ramachandran/critical-reflections-on-raid-and-rescue-operations-in-new-delhi
My piece “Rescued but not Released: the “protective custody” of sex workers in India” was published along with several excellent pieces critiquing anti-trafficking and anti-slavery discourses at Open Democracy.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/rescued-but-not-released-protective-custody-of-sex-workers-in-i/
My contribution to the Field Notes section for the journal Cultural
Anthropology explored the theme of Illegality through the lens of Translation, using different fieldwork moments amidst anti-trafficking interventions in India:
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/559-illegality-translation
COURSES TAUGHT AT UCI
Undergraduate
Lower Division: Global Human Rights
Upper Division: Global Trafficking, Global Gender and Sexuality (Upper Division Writing), Global Childhoods
Graduate
Theories of Globalization
INTERVIEWS ABOUT SOME OF MY WONDERFUL STUDENTS