Bio

Hello! I am Vidhu Priya Mukundan, a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at Boston University. I am also a Graduate Student Affiliate at the BU Center for Innovation in Social Sciences (BU CISS).

My research examines key questions of women’s political participation at the hyperlocal level in urban India, drawing on women’s political social networks, party politics, and public policy. Having worked with women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) in India since my undergraduate days, I let the field shape my research questions at every stage. As a mixed-methods researcher, I use ethnographic research methods such as interviews, focus groups, and shadowing, to build theory inductively, and test it with micro-level surveys embedded with survey experiments.

My dissertation project explores how women’s grassroots leadership is created and recognized in the slums of Hyderabad, India. The citizen-state relationship in urban areas is often mediated by political brokers, who are predominantly men affiliated with political parties. Prior research suggests that women prefer problem-solving networks that don’t represent party politics. Further, the gendered division of household labor closely ties them to the provision of public services. Yet we know little about women’s interaction with political brokers, especially in a setting where patriarchal norms are more likely to dictate these relationships. My research centers women – both as citizens and as intermediaries, and expands the universe of political intermediaries to include those unaffiliated with parties – Indian women’s Self-Help Groups.

My research has been funded by the BU Global Development Policy Center, BU Graduate Student Organization, and the BU Department of Political Science.

I also co-founded the BU South Asia Group for Emerging Research (BU SAGER). If you are a graduate student in BU and your research is based on South Asia, we would love to have you join our working group! You can reach out to me by email for more details.

You can contact me on my email vpmn@bu.edu.