Archiving Knowledge
Computing & Material Culture
When conserving objects or materials which are subject to decay, our conservation efforts may at most preserve them for a few centuries. The only way to truly preserve them is to preserve knowledge of their making. This collaborative project entails a reimagining of AI and computing methods to archive endangered aspects of craft, culture and heritage.
Decolonizing Craft Narratives
Craft Research
This project examines how various actors in the craft world create meaning and value in their use and practice of craft. Through archival and ethnographic methods, this research links the historical divisions between craft and industry, the handmade and mechanized to contemporary questions of skill, meaning and value.
Crafting Strength
Practice-based Research
Dominant narratives around contemporary fitness fetishize pain and suffering, almost as if they are the dues one must pay to ‘earn’ a fit body. This practice-based research seeks to disconnect the body from narratives of pain and suffering to imagine a more joyful path to fitness.
The Sari & Social Media
Social Media & Market Case Study
This research, part of my doctoral dissertation, emerged from my observations of sari revival movements on social media. Although saris occupy a lion’s share of the Indian retail market, why are they perceived as endangered and in need of revival? What do saris signify in the larger realm of culture and identity? This research linked identity projects on social media to the clothing consumption of women in urban India. I employed a mixed-methods approach entailing ethnography, social media analysis and quantitative market analysis to contextualize contemporary anxieties about identity within larger patterns of consumption.
A Cultural History of the Sari
Historical & Ethnographic Research
This research, part of my doctoral dissertation, was conducted to unearth a cultural history of the sari as draped clothing. Using a mixed methods approach combining ethnography, archival research, media study, visual & material analysis, I studied the sari’s mutations through the colonial and postcolonial periods, focusing on the emergence of the Nivi style of drape, and what it signified about a new identity for Indian women. For whom was this new image fashioned, and whom did it exclude? I am presently writing a monograph about the Modern Sari.