Priya Chandrasekaran

Student Fellow

Priya Chandrasekaran joined the Program in Anthropology after a decade as an outdoor educator and leader of service learning programs throughout the Global South. Her research focuses on women farmers and rainfed grains in the Himalayan foothills and explores how debt, obligation, risk, and dependence factor into the political, economic, and ecological imaginaries and anxieties of projects for “food security,” “food sovereignty,” and “biodiversity.” She has taught Humanities and Anthropology at Pratt Institute and Hunter College, and has integrated technology into environmental science courses at Baruch College.

Participating Years

2014–2015

After Debt: New Forms of Dependency, Obligation, Risk, and Credit

‘After Debt’ imagines a world beyond debt and pursues it as a research agenda across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. How have economic failures been transformed into personal identities, often dividing those deemed “at risk” from those capable of assuming risk? How might we understand histories of debt within genealogies of the fiscal military nation-state? What alternate meanings of dependency, obligation, risk, and credit have people produced within and against debt regimes, such as those enforced by structural adjustment?