Khushboo Srivastava

Khushboo Srivastava has worked as a research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) in Mumbai, where she was involved in the project “Citizenship Futures – The Politics of Hope”, and more specifically was engaged in conducting fieldwork at Ramabai Nagar, a predominantly Dalit neighborhood in Mumbai. Khushboo is currently an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy and Governance of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Hyderabad, India. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, in 2020. Through her doctoral work, she brought conceptual frameworks drawn from the feminist critiques of the Social Contract theory to understand surrogacy as a form of feminized labour and its changing legal contexts.

Through her intensive ethnographic research with sex workers, surrogate women, and domestic workers, Khushboo has delved into issues of waged employment for women in precarious forms of labor, questions of domination–empowerment, and the quest for agency and personhood. Her most recent published works are “Decoding Surrogacy: Mothering in Context of Money and Market” (Women’s Link, 2019) and “Everyday Activism amid the Pandemic: Civic Associations as Avenues of Hope for the Marginalized” (Antipode, 2020), co‑authored by Öznur Yardımcı.