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

Saving the Slaving Child: Domestic Work, Labor Trafficking, and the Politics of Rescue in India, Humanity (An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development), 10 (3), Winter 2019.

Co-authored with Sally E. Merry, The Limits of Consent: Trafficking and the Problem of International Paternalism, in Michael Barnett, ed. (2017). Paternalism Beyond Borders. Cambridge University Press.

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

Yiping Cai

Jane Sakr