Aishwarya Kazi

Aishwarya Kazi is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Yale. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Presidency University, Kolkata, and her M.A. in Development and Labour Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was also enrolled as a doctoral student of Social Anthropology at IIT Delhi before she joined Yale. Previously, Kazi had conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Sunderbans of the Bengal Delta where she studied the everyday lives of islanders losing their homes to erosion. At Yale, she will examine how state-led development, environmental technologies, and the material and discursive effects of climate change come together to produce conditions of dispossession in a postcolonial context. She aims to trace the twentieth-century legacy of the deltaic region in the present day through both archival research and ethnographic fieldwork.