Concentration: Health
Biography
Archi is a PhD student studying how marginalised women’s bodies become bioavailable and are disciplined through medical and technological interventions. She is particularly interested in understanding how unequal social positioning translates to easy access to women’s bodies and labour, commercialising them as properties. She received a Master of Arts in North American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2025 and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Jadavpur University in 2021. Her master’s thesis titled ‘Altruism goes both ways’- A comparative study on the disciplining of surrogate mother-workers of the USA and India through advertisements and socio-economic conditions’ explores bio-precarious bodies of surrogate mothers and the disciplining they go through to alienate themselves from the labour. It looks at the language of ads in surrogacy clinics. It explains how the rhetoric of love is carefully and consciously used to undermine the value of labour and emotional work surrogates put in.
She is advised by Prof Judith Houck and Prof Annie Menzel.
Most recently, she worked as a research assistant in the School of Women’s Studies at Jadavpur University, archiving oral histories of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women in Indian Higher education and examining the intersecting marginalities that shape their experiences.