Academic
“Racial melancholia as praxis: Refusal and collective life beyond the model minority formation,” cultural geographies (2025)
In this article, I contribute to debates about the racial politics of inclusion and limits of recognition by engaging literature about racial capitalism, carceral geography, and negative geographies. I argue that the expansion of carceral geographies cannot be understood without the context of Asian racialization in the US. Simultaneously, modes of refusal, located in the affective lives of Asian subjects, might indicate strategies of life otherwise for minoritized subjects in the US. In this sense, affective politics are core to this argument, gesturing to politics that may not be intentional but nonetheless orient collective life against the repressive structures of white supremacy and racial capitalism.
“The Carceral Geographies of Platform-Based Delivery Work: Essential Work and Bike Registrations in New York City,” Antipode (2024)
This paper demonstrates how platforms and police produce carceral geographies that manage and exploit immigrant delivery workers as surplus populations. The carceral geographies of the platform economy account for both how carceral space produces and manages the surplus populations from which platform capital draws its workers, facilitating the disposability and exploitation of workers. Focusing on South Asian delivery workers in New York City, the paper uses the example of bike registrations to show how police and platforms expand carceral spaces in immigrant communities, increasing their vulnerability to premature death and violence.
“Under Attack from the State and in Our Homes: Materialist Interventions and Lessons in Abolition Feminisms from Desis Rising Up & Moving,” with Jensine Raihan and Akash Singh, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2024)
In this paper we consider working-class abolitionist feminists’ conceptualizations of safety. Taking seriously the notion that “freedom is a place,” we look at how working-class South Asians and Indo Caribbeans in New York City build livable worlds at the intersecting crises of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We look at Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)’s organizing efforts following the expansion of immigrant detention and policing that came after the 1996 immigration laws and their contemporary organizing around gender-based violence and oppression as examples of a materialist articulation of abolition feminism.
Other Writing
“Rising Waters from New York City to Pakistan: Abolitionist Organizing at the Intersection of Immigration Justice and the Climate Crisis,” with Akash Singh. Book chapter in Border. Abolition. Now. (2024)
In this chapter we consider the impacts of the border in structuring the impacts of climate change in the everyday lives of working class immigrants in New York City. In other words, we ask how does the U.S. border facilitate extra vulnerability to the climate crisis and environmental injustice? What might the experiences of working class immigrants tell us about the transnational components of border-induced climate change vulnerability? And lastly, how might we, as abolitionists, reframe working class, immigrant organizing in NYC for a robust social safety net and life affirming institutions in the context of the climate crisis?