Gender and Politics | MIGRATION | SOUTH ASIA
Rithika Kumar
I study how the household shapes women’s political lives: who speaks to the state, who runs for office, and who governs once elected.
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University. My research lies at the intersection of gender, urbanization and politics with a regional specialization on South Asia, specifically India.
I ask how development processes such as economic migration and political decentralization change local political engagement by reshaping the relationship between private and public life. Much of that work treats the household, and not the individual, as the unit of political analysis.
I utilize a mixed methods approach combining large scale observational and administrative data, with fieldwork intensive quantitative and qualitative data. My research has been published in the Journal of Politics and I am currently working on my book project, Silent Shifts: Male Migration and the Feminization of Politics.
I received my PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and spent 2023–24 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Earlier, I was a Research Associate at IDFC Institute in Mumbai, working on state capacity and electoral politics. I hold an MA in economics from the University of Mumbai and a BA in economics and statistics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.
My email address is rk115@rice.edu. You can also follow me on Twitter @kumar_rithika.
