Academic
“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?