Karishma Desai

Dr. Karishma Desai’s interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and professional engagements employ anthropological and feminist lenses in the study of childhood/youth, gender, and education. Her central concerns gravitate around the politics of knowledge and being, and attend to how gendered and racialized differences are stabilized and unsettled. She examines the contested ways in which global norms about gender and childhood/youth are consolidated, translated, and negotiated in educational sites predominantly in South Asia and the United States. Attending to global discourses alongside the everyday embodied and relational cultural lives of young people within unequal educational contexts, she investigates the kinds of gendered subjectivities that are forwarded as desirable with particular attention to the values, aspirations, and affective orientations made available. In doing so, she is interested in onto-epistemic questions related to sites of figuring and educating young people. She asks: what knowledges and ontologies matter in constructions of gendered childhoods? How have they come to matter and how are they disrupted? As a scholar and educator, she is invested in attending to educational problems by foregrounding the construction of youth, their complex material lives, subjugated knowledges, and modes of being that might offer new possibilities. These questions and investments result in the study of coloniality within educational sites and feminist scholarship that decenters liberal, anthropocentric constructions of the human.

Publications:

• Desai, K. (2022). Immaterial precarity and affective states of anticipation: NGO afterlives of non-elite young women in New Delhi. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12437

• Desai, K., & Angod, L. (2022). Unsettling the global, moving beyond the liberal: Intimacies as reading practice in childhood studies. Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, 29 (3) https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221112991

• Desai, K. (2020). Life skills as affective labour: Skilling girls with gendered enterprise. Journal of South Asian Studies, 43(4), 705-722. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1768479

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Teaching the Third World Girl: Affective logics of Girl Rising. Postcolonial Geographies, University of British Columbia

• Learning affective labor: Skilling girls across New Delhi and New York City. Girlhood Studies, Bowdoin College.

Previous Organizations: 

• United Nations Girls Education Project

• Teaching Asian American Stories New Jersey/YURI Education Project

• Teachers College, Columbia University

Accomplishments:

• National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Anthropology and Education Concha Delgado Gaitán Presidential Fellow

• Gerardo Marin Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship

Upcoming Projects:

• Gender Transformative Education Praxis Project with United Nations Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI)

• Shaping Youth Potential: Development, Gendered Aspirations and Contested Visions of Indigenous Futures in Western India

• Asian American/Ethnic Studies Curricular/Professional Development K-12

My interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and professional engagements employ anthropological and transnational feminist lenses in the study of race, childhood, gender, and education.