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I am a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am presently sheltering in place in the Irvine for the COVID-19 pandemic. My attachments extend to urban south Asia, specifically Delhi, where I grew up and from where a migrant exodus is underway. I have attempted to understand air pollution governance in Delhi, particularly the types of expertise harnessed to provide explanations of causalities, uncertainties, and strategies. One persistent concern is who is left out conceptually and materially from such explanations, and how histories of urban planning and environmental advocacy contribute to this process. A major portion of this ethnographic work is archived and analysed at the The Asthma Files platform, where I continue to be a collaborator. I am also involved in the ongoing Visualizing Toxic Places project, and have previously participated in the New Orleans Field Campus in 2019. Currently, my research interests involve understanding articulations of citizenship, religion, and (trans)nationalisms that emerge from studying environmental scientific and advocacy communities. 

The questions I am interested in following:

(1) How, in different settings, have dominant political regimes and ideologies shaped COVID-19 preparation and response? 

(2) In a particular setting, what organizations -- governmental, commercial, religious, activist -- have been involved (through action or inaction) in COVID-19 response?  How are these organizations coordinating among themselves? Which organizations have the most cultural authority and political power? 

(3) How is COVID-19 knowledge and expertise moving across national borders? 

(4) How are different ecologies implicated in COVID-19?  

(5) What capacities are there (in different settings) to question how COVID-19 knowledge, management and care are taking shape?

I can be contacted at psrigyan@uci.edu