Dr Khushboo Srivastava

Personal Info

Dr. Khushboo Srivastava is an Assistant Professor at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She received her Ph.D. and M. Phil. from Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Using the theoretical framework of the Sexual Contract, she has explored the ideas of agency and empowerment in context of feminized forms of labor. For her doctoral work "Reproduction, Body and Agency: A Study of Surrogacy in India", she brought conceptual frameworks drawn from the feminist critiques of the Social Contract theory to understand surrogacy as a form of feminized labour and its changing legal contexts. She earlier worked as an Assistant Professor at School of Public Policy and Governance at TISS, Hyderabad. Before joining TISS, she was working at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay on a project, "Citizenship Futures - The Politics of Hope." The project was a collaboration between Indian Council of Social Science Research, University of York, United Kingdom and CESDIP, Paris that tried to explore avenues and significance of hope in the political imaginations of socially excluded people. She has also worked as a Guest faculty at School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Department of Civics and Politics, Mumbai University. Apart from these she also holds experience of teaching at Banasthali University in Rajasthan. Khushboo has worked intensively on the ground with sex workers, surrogate women, domestic workers, and marginal groups living in slum of Mumbai. Through her ethnographic research, she has been able to delve on issues of waged employment in precarious forms of labor, domination, objectification, conflict, experiences of struggle, resilience to forces of market and state and subsequent quest for agency and personhood