Rianka Roy
Biographic Data
| ID | 3793498 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rianka Roy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rianka |
| FAMILY NAME | Roy |
| SIGNATURE | ROY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wake Forest University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0553-1938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Where is “class” in claiming citizenship
Prema Kurien’s Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion and Political Mobilization among New Americans (2025) is a sociological study of Indian immigrants’ political activism in the United States. While the author focuses on race and religion in the analysis, I argue that class is an important aspect of racialized immigrations’ pursuit of citizenship. I discuss three possible ways in which the inclusion of class could have expanded the analytical rea…
Relational counterpublics
This article analyzes 2135 news reports published in four languages in India and the United States about the COVID Delta variant surge in India in 2021. We theorize how the dominant and alternate or counter media discourses, in varying structural and political contexts, emerged as ‘relational counterpublics’. Influenced by scholarly decolonial conversations critical of methodological nationalism, we examine pandemic media discourses in their glob…
Resentment and Recrimination
Gendered Patterns of Counter-dissemination
Religious nationalism exacerbates the vulnerabilities of socially marginalised groups like women and immigrants. Ironically, it also creates several spaces for social and political engagement for marginalised groups, and recruits them in networks of ideological dissemination. Some of these networks transnationally bring together diasporic members, who create global consent for religious nationalist governments in their home countries. But studyin…
Ideal and aspiring citizens
Despite growing evidence of their precarity, high-income workers are mostly excluded from the literature on informal workers and their activism. Also, while informal workers—even as undocumented immigrants—mobilize discourses of citizenship in their activism, it remains unclear how citizens and documented immigrants facing de facto exclusion from citizenship organize. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, I show how Ind…
Contrasts and Continuity
Praxis of compliance
Feminist activism persisted even in the isolating times of the COVID-19 pandemic. But how did the crisis shape feminist solidarity, especially for subjects facing multiple marginalities? In this article, based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, I examine how women tech workers in India – as gendered labour in the Global South – participated in various online groups to overcome their isolation. These women ostensibly acted as comp…
Water, Water, Everywhere… but for Whom
Bandana Purkayastha and Rianka Roy on scarcity and supply in a thirsty world
Covert carcerality for “high‐income cheap labor
In racial capitalism, employers increase their profit by recruiting “cheap labor,” who are typically racialized minorities. States and employers govern these workers by carceral means, variously confining them, extracting their labor, and ensuring that they remain docile enough not to protest and demand better wages and rights. But how are workers—who draw high wages yet experience labor devaluation or “cheapening”—governed? Based on interviews a…
We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Based on 33 in-depth interviews with high-skilled Asian Indian immigrants in the USA during the pandem…
Politics Through Precarity
The Indian technology industry is an economic asset for the State. Successive governments and corporations identify tech workers as privileged and their mobilisation as unnecessary. High-skilled tech workers are apparently different from non-tech workers and remain secluded from politics. Tech workers' trade unions, however, can decisively subvert these claims. From three tech unions' Facebook posts in 2020, the first COVID-19 year, this study fi…
Hidden in Plain Sight
Politicians and mainstream media in the EU, UK, and US regularly emphasize the need for highly skilled migrants, but, over the last few decades, the terms and conditions for these highly skilled migrants have changed drastically. As part of the neoliberal migrant control regime, highly skilled migrants are brought to countries under very restrictive conditions. They work and contribute taxes but have few to no political rights. Based on data on h…
Immigrant workers' movements in the U.S
Immigrant workers in the U.S. mobilize through labor unions, worker centers and even autonomously for their rights. But existing literature on immigrant workers' movements mentions only low‐wage, low‐skilled and undocumented immigrants, who represent the majority of non‐citizens in the country. There is no discussion on how high‐skilled ‘nonimmigrant’ workers (or immigrants on temporary work visas) mobilize. A relatively small section of migratio…
Intersectional Coloniality in 19th Century India
Precarious Privilege
This article focuses on Indian tech-workers’ views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assu…
Hidden in Plain Sight
Politicians and mainstream media in the EU, UK, and US regularly emphasize the need for highly skilled migrants, but, over the last few decades, the terms and conditions for these highly skilled migrants have changed drastically. As part of the neoliberal migrant control regime, highly skilled migrants are brought to countries under very restrictive conditions. They work and contribute taxes but have few to no political rights. Based on data on h…
Politics Through Precarity
The Indian technology industry is an economic asset for the State. Successive governments and corporations identify tech workers as privileged and their mobilisation as unnecessary. High-skilled tech workers are apparently different from non-tech workers and remain secluded from politics. Tech workers' trade unions, however, can decisively subvert these claims. From three tech unions' Facebook posts in 2020, the first COVID-19 year, this study fi…
Precarious Privilege
This article focuses on Indian tech-workers’ views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assu…
We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Based on 33 in-depth interviews with high-skilled Asian Indian immigrants in the USA during the pandem…
Ideal and aspiring citizens
Despite growing evidence of their precarity, high-income workers are mostly excluded from the literature on informal workers and their activism. Also, while informal workers—even as undocumented immigrants—mobilize discourses of citizenship in their activism, it remains unclear how citizens and documented immigrants facing de facto exclusion from citizenship organize. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, I show how Ind…
Covert carcerality for “high‐income cheap labor
In racial capitalism, employers increase their profit by recruiting “cheap labor,” who are typically racialized minorities. States and employers govern these workers by carceral means, variously confining them, extracting their labor, and ensuring that they remain docile enough not to protest and demand better wages and rights. But how are workers—who draw high wages yet experience labor devaluation or “cheapening”—governed? Based on interviews a…
Immigrant workers' movements in the U.S
Immigrant workers in the U.S. mobilize through labor unions, worker centers and even autonomously for their rights. But existing literature on immigrant workers' movements mentions only low‐wage, low‐skilled and undocumented immigrants, who represent the majority of non‐citizens in the country. There is no discussion on how high‐skilled ‘nonimmigrant’ workers (or immigrants on temporary work visas) mobilize. A relatively small section of migratio…
Precarious Privilege
This article focuses on Indian tech-workers’ views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assu…
Immigrant workers' movements in the U.S
Immigrant workers in the U.S. mobilize through labor unions, worker centers and even autonomously for their rights. But existing literature on immigrant workers' movements mentions only low‐wage, low‐skilled and undocumented immigrants, who represent the majority of non‐citizens in the country. There is no discussion on how high‐skilled ‘nonimmigrant’ workers (or immigrants on temporary work visas) mobilize. A relatively small section of migratio…
Intersectional Coloniality in 19th Century India
Hidden in Plain Sight
Politicians and mainstream media in the EU, UK, and US regularly emphasize the need for highly skilled migrants, but, over the last few decades, the terms and conditions for these highly skilled migrants have changed drastically. As part of the neoliberal migrant control regime, highly skilled migrants are brought to countries under very restrictive conditions. They work and contribute taxes but have few to no political rights. Based on data on h…
Water, Water, Everywhere… but for Whom
Bandana Purkayastha and Rianka Roy on scarcity and supply in a thirsty world
Covert carcerality for “high‐income cheap labor
In racial capitalism, employers increase their profit by recruiting “cheap labor,” who are typically racialized minorities. States and employers govern these workers by carceral means, variously confining them, extracting their labor, and ensuring that they remain docile enough not to protest and demand better wages and rights. But how are workers—who draw high wages yet experience labor devaluation or “cheapening”—governed? Based on interviews a…
We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Based on 33 in-depth interviews with high-skilled Asian Indian immigrants in the USA during the pandem…
Politics Through Precarity
The Indian technology industry is an economic asset for the State. Successive governments and corporations identify tech workers as privileged and their mobilisation as unnecessary. High-skilled tech workers are apparently different from non-tech workers and remain secluded from politics. Tech workers' trade unions, however, can decisively subvert these claims. From three tech unions' Facebook posts in 2020, the first COVID-19 year, this study fi…
Relational counterpublics
This article analyzes 2135 news reports published in four languages in India and the United States about the COVID Delta variant surge in India in 2021. We theorize how the dominant and alternate or counter media discourses, in varying structural and political contexts, emerged as ‘relational counterpublics’. Influenced by scholarly decolonial conversations critical of methodological nationalism, we examine pandemic media discourses in their glob…
Resentment and Recrimination
Gendered Patterns of Counter-dissemination
Religious nationalism exacerbates the vulnerabilities of socially marginalised groups like women and immigrants. Ironically, it also creates several spaces for social and political engagement for marginalised groups, and recruits them in networks of ideological dissemination. Some of these networks transnationally bring together diasporic members, who create global consent for religious nationalist governments in their home countries. But studyin…
Ideal and aspiring citizens
Despite growing evidence of their precarity, high-income workers are mostly excluded from the literature on informal workers and their activism. Also, while informal workers—even as undocumented immigrants—mobilize discourses of citizenship in their activism, it remains unclear how citizens and documented immigrants facing de facto exclusion from citizenship organize. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, I show how Ind…
Contrasts and Continuity
Praxis of compliance
Feminist activism persisted even in the isolating times of the COVID-19 pandemic. But how did the crisis shape feminist solidarity, especially for subjects facing multiple marginalities? In this article, based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, I examine how women tech workers in India – as gendered labour in the Global South – participated in various online groups to overcome their isolation. These women ostensibly acted as comp…
Where is “class” in claiming citizenship
Prema Kurien’s Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion and Political Mobilization among New Americans (2025) is a sociological study of Indian immigrants’ political activism in the United States. While the author focuses on race and religion in the analysis, I argue that class is an important aspect of racialized immigrations’ pursuit of citizenship. I discuss three possible ways in which the inclusion of class could have expanded the analytical rea…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works)