State, governance, law, bureaucracy—and questions of method.

My work explores the state, governance, law, and bureaucracy through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India. My first book, Paper Tiger, examines how the everyday life of the state makes law real, how ambitious development projects are converted into practice through paperwork and routine bureaucratic practices.

My second book, Crooked Cats, turns to the nonhuman world and the climate crisis. It asks how the state seeks to regulate big cats that have gone crooked, and what these crooked beasts might be telling us about a planet in crisis. While the book remains rooted in fieldwork in the Indian Himalaya, it also travels into urban India, tracing the wider political and environmental worlds within which human and nonhuman lives become entangled. If Paper Tiger asks how law and development become real through paperwork and the space of the sarkari daftar (government office), Crooked Cats asks how governance reaches into multispecies worlds and how those worlds, in turn, reshape our understanding of the Anthropocene.

More recently, my work has become increasingly concerned with questions of method.