Rajni Palriwala

Rajni Palriwala is Professor and currently Head at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. She has taught at the University of Delhi since 1982 and at the University of Leiden. Her research falls within the broad area of gender relations, covering care, citizenship, and the state, kinship and marriage, dowry, women and work, women’s movements and feminist politics, and fieldwork methodology. Cross-cultural comparison is an underlying interest. She has done fieldwork in a village in Rajasthan (agrarian structure, gender, work and family), in Leh, Ladakh, (on urban forms and social organization), in slums in Delhi (women’s collective actions), in Leiden, The Netherlands (single parents and the welfare state), and more recently and briefly in Haryana and Tamil Nadu.
Her books include Care, culture and citizenship: Revisiting the politics of welfare in the Netherlands (with C. Risseeuw and K. Ganesh, Het Spinhuis, 2005) and Changing kinship, family, and gender relations in South Asia: Processes, trends and issues (Vena, Leiden, 1994). She has co-edited Marriage, migration, and gender (ed. with Patricia Uberoi, Sage, 2008), Shifting circles of support: Contextualising kinship and gender relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (ed. with C. Risseeuw, Sage, 1996), and Struc­tures and strategies: Women, work and family in Asia (ed. with L. Dube, Sage, 1990).

For the UNRISD project on The Political and Social Economy of Care she has been part of the Indian research team.