Sneha Annavarapu
Biographic Data
| ID | 263480 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sneha Annavarapu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sneha |
| FAMILY NAME | Annavarapu |
| SIGNATURE | ANNAVARAPU S |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1428-9442 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Law in Motion
In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the …
A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption
This volume renews the study of corruption as 'embedded' in ongoing social relations. Instead of treating corruption as a universal phenomenon, A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption shows how corruption is often morally ambiguous and deeply intertwined with the social, political and economic struggles of particular groups in specific times and places. Ranging from Early Modernity to the present day, and spanning across the globe, the b…
Drivers of masculinity
In this paper, I consider how the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped the gendered self‐understandings of cabdrivers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Extending research on the pandemic's effect on economically and socially marginalised groups such as app‐based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, in this paper, I ask: how does a crisis like the pandemic impact self‐understandings of men cabdrivers? How does …
Surface Tensions
In this article I draw on the embodied experience of driving into potholes and on bumpy roads in Hyderabad to show how pockmarked roads become a terrain on which political sensibilities are shaped. Drawing on ethnographic material collected over six years, I analyze how potholes shape driving dispositions in a city that is attempting to brand itself as ‘world class’. I show that far from being merely physical interruptions on the surface of the r…
Masculinity, Consumerism, and the Post-National Indian City
Gendering Infrastructure
In their introduction to this collection, Yaffa Truelove and Sneha Annavarapu contend that gender – as a relational and intersectional concept, as a category of self-identification and as lived experience – fundamentally shapes infrastructure and is, in turn, shaped by it
The Weight of Waiting
In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time…
Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions
A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. This study investigates how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared s…
Brokers and Bribes in India
In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from corruption as a “problem” to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy
The Social Life of the State
"Where do all the lovers go?" - The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950-2005)
Public expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural-political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspape…
Consuming wellness, producing difference
Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of “self-care” regimes and “body projects” in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western context…
Religious Nationalism in a Global Age
This article attempts to present an understanding of the current discussions regarding religious nationalism in a global framework in order to solicit two themes in the case of Hindu Nationalism and revivalism. One, the conflict of interest that arises between globalization as a “means” and as an “end”; two, the implications of network societies and the politics of marginalization. Globalization is looked at from two ends of a spectrum—as an end …
The Social Life of the State
Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions
A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. This study investigates how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared s…
The Weight of Waiting
In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time…
"Where do all the lovers go?" - The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950-2005)
Public expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural-political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspape…
Drivers of masculinity
In this paper, I consider how the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped the gendered self‐understandings of cabdrivers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Extending research on the pandemic's effect on economically and socially marginalised groups such as app‐based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, in this paper, I ask: how does a crisis like the pandemic impact self‐understandings of men cabdrivers? How does …
Religious Nationalism in a Global Age
This article attempts to present an understanding of the current discussions regarding religious nationalism in a global framework in order to solicit two themes in the case of Hindu Nationalism and revivalism. One, the conflict of interest that arises between globalization as a “means” and as an “end”; two, the implications of network societies and the politics of marginalization. Globalization is looked at from two ends of a spectrum—as an end …
Religious Nationalism in a Global Age
This article attempts to present an understanding of the current discussions regarding religious nationalism in a global framework in order to solicit two themes in the case of Hindu Nationalism and revivalism. One, the conflict of interest that arises between globalization as a “means” and as an “end”; two, the implications of network societies and the politics of marginalization. Globalization is looked at from two ends of a spectrum—as an end …
Consuming wellness, producing difference
Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of “self-care” regimes and “body projects” in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western context…
"Where do all the lovers go?" - The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950-2005)
Public expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural-political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspape…
Brokers and Bribes in India
In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from corruption as a “problem” to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy
The Social Life of the State
The Weight of Waiting
In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time…
Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions
A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. This study investigates how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared s…
Gendering Infrastructure
In their introduction to this collection, Yaffa Truelove and Sneha Annavarapu contend that gender – as a relational and intersectional concept, as a category of self-identification and as lived experience – fundamentally shapes infrastructure and is, in turn, shaped by it
Surface Tensions
In this article I draw on the embodied experience of driving into potholes and on bumpy roads in Hyderabad to show how pockmarked roads become a terrain on which political sensibilities are shaped. Drawing on ethnographic material collected over six years, I analyze how potholes shape driving dispositions in a city that is attempting to brand itself as ‘world class’. I show that far from being merely physical interruptions on the surface of the r…
Masculinity, Consumerism, and the Post-National Indian City
Law in Motion
In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the …
A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption
This volume renews the study of corruption as 'embedded' in ongoing social relations. Instead of treating corruption as a universal phenomenon, A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption shows how corruption is often morally ambiguous and deeply intertwined with the social, political and economic struggles of particular groups in specific times and places. Ranging from Early Modernity to the present day, and spanning across the globe, the b…
Drivers of masculinity
In this paper, I consider how the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped the gendered self‐understandings of cabdrivers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Extending research on the pandemic's effect on economically and socially marginalised groups such as app‐based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, in this paper, I ask: how does a crisis like the pandemic impact self‐understandings of men cabdrivers? How does …
Sociology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Law (4 works)