Tarini Bedi, PhD
LAS Distinguished Professor
Anthropology, Sociocultural
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BSB 2110C
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1007 W. Harrison Street
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About
I am an ethnographer who researches the relationships between urbanization and globalization, politics, governance, gender relations, religion, kinship, and economic livelihoods in cities of the global South. My recent fieldwork, teaching and pedagogical engagements have also led me to a range of interdisciplinary intersections across the humanities, social, and technological sciences where I ethnographically investigate the social and cultural life of infrastructure and the built environment, Mobilities and borders, environment and ecology, and the changing technologies of work. I conduct my research in India, on the borders of India and Pakistan, Singapore, and the United States.
Across these diverse topics and areas, all my work centers cities (both big and small) and the urban experience. I am interested in how people navigate and know their cities; how they make and sustain valuable lives and livelihoods; how they make social and economic decisions; who gets excluded and who determines these exclusions; how and when people move between cities and other places; how borders within cities and between cities and surrounding areas get constructed and drawn; and how political, social, economic, and ecological landscapes impact urban life.
I am also dedicated to developing a public and accessible ethnographic practice, ethnographic writing and ethnographic pedagogy. I develop these interests in much of my current work.
I am the author of three books. The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena: Political Matronage in Urbanizing India (2016, SUNY Press); Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (2022, University of Washington Press; and South Asia on the Move: Mobilities, Mobilization, and Maneuver (edited with Ben Linder; 2024, Amsterdam University Press). Mumbai Taximen was the winner of the 2023 Victor Turner Prize (2nd Prize) for ethnographic writing.
Details on my other publications and research activities can be found on my CV and my website.
My fieldwork and research have been generously supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, and the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS).
I am co-Editor of the Anthropology of Work Review and member of the Editorial and Publications Board for the Association of Asian Studies.
Between 2023-2025, I serve as Program Director for Cultural Anthropology at the US National Science Foundation.
Education
PhD in Anthropology from University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009
MA in Anthropology from University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004
MA in Political Science from McGill University, 1998
BA in Social Sciences and Theater from Bennington College, 1995
FYBA from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai, India