Currently, I work as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Wellbeing at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain.

Prior to this, I worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus. I also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in an ERC-funded research project at Sussex University and Goldsmiths, University of London. My post-doctoral research explored the relationship between childhood, politics, and public life using qualitative, ethnographic, and longitudinal approaches.

I received my Ph.D. in Social Policy from The University of Edinburgh in 2014. Before that, I had worked with civil society organizations, state/central governments, and multilateral agencies as a development practitioner in India for about ten years. In particular, I worked directly with the children after the 2004 tsunami, directed the implementation of a community-based psychosocial intervention program for Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF-B), and provided consultation with a local NGO on children’s rights in the post-disaster context. I also worked with the UNDP/Planning Commission on Strengthening State Plans for Human Development and several non-profit organizations on a range of social development and humanitarian issues, such as education for all, child protection, disaster response and preparedness, decentralized human development planning, rights of the children living in the margins of the society, and caste and gender-based discrimination.

I am specialized in interdisciplinary research that contributes knowledge broadly to the domains of social theories, early years provision, social policy analysis, children’s rights, and childhoods of the majority world. My current and previous research involve quantitative and qualitative approaches, extensive ethnographic fieldwork, creative methods, cross-cultural analysis and multi-methods. To date, I have published works mainly in the fields of sociology of childhood, political sociology, early years of provision, and children's rights.