INTRODUCTION

I am an anthropologist and currently work as a senior university lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Jyväskylä where I have led a Finnish Academy-funded research project “Sustainable Livelihoods and Politics at the Margins: Environmental Displacement in South Asia”.

I have carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the appropriation of mobile phones in rural India. My latest research has explored the politics of climate change in India, including the role of digital media. My research interests also include development, gender, and kinship.

I worked as a researcher at the Academy of Finland and taught anthropology at the University of Helsinki before joining the University of Jyväskylä in 2021. My teaching includes courses on all levels: basic, subject, advanced, and postgraduate studies. The themes of my courses range from technology studies, anthropological theory, kinship, and gender to South Asian ethnography and climate change.

As the director of the Nordic Centre in lndia (2013-2014), I was responsible for developing South Asia-related curriculum and monitoring the teaching for Nordic students of the university consortium which included 16 Nordic universities.

My doctoral dissertation explored women’s wage work and agency in urban India. In addition to mobile telephony and climate change, my post-doctoral research has focused on women’s political participation, symbolic construction or power, and politics as well as reconstructions of gift-giving and the market in rural India.

My latest book “A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in Rural India” was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. In addition to eight books, I have published articles in such peer review journals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Modern Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia. My books Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics, and Development (Anthem Press 2012) and Muuttuva Intia (in Finnish, Edita 2007), which I wrote with Minna Säävälä, give a general idea of contemporary India as well as my research. I have been a visiting scholar at Brown University and at the University of Western Ontario.