AUSTIN, TX (TIP): Vrinda Marwa, a Doctoral Candidate of Sociology at University of Texas at Austin is among the winners of the 2020 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowships. The prestigious fellowships support a year of research and writing to help advanced graduate students in the humanities and social sciences in the last year of PhD dissertation writing and are awarded to 65 students each year.

Vrinda Marwah is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests are in reproductive health and women’s labor in contemporary India.

Vrinda’s Master’s thesis focused on hijras in India, and examined debates around sexual subjectivity, identity, and terminology in the context of HIV/AIDS, queer mobilization and legal reform.  She received her MSc in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics, and her BA in Political Science from the University of Delhi.

Vrinda has worked in Delhi at the research, capacity building, and policy advocacy levels with feminist groups Sama and CREA.

Vrinda got the fellowship for her project ‘Reproducing the State: Women Community Health Volunteers in North India.’

Working in the heart of India’s reproductive health care system, this project explores how the contemporary state constitutes citizenship through the modality of care. It examines the working lives of women community health workers, called ASHAs, who are “volunteers” paid to motivate poor women to use public health services. ASHAs reveal the productive power of an understudied and intensely gendered role in the state: the frontline bureaucrat. Because of the deeply intimate knowledge ASHAs have of their clients, and the networks they build among public and private health care providers, they become highly sought-after actors in service delivery. Through 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this project uncovers how the sociality of these women exceeds, and reconstitutes, the policy they are meant to implement.