Mona Mehta is Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Arts at the School of Arts and Sciences. She is a political scientist with research interests in urban transformations, democracy, and middle-class politics in the context of Gujarat and India at large. She is working on a book manuscript examining the cultural politics of urban transformations in post-liberalisation India. Her book will explore what we can learn about India’s urbanisation by examining the trajectories of pastoralists or maldharis, who have increasingly settled into urban spaces, and their strategies to navigate the precarious urban informal economy. Her previous work explored the vulnerability and complicity of democratic and civic spaces in the production of exclusionary politics. She is also interested in the valuable insights that can be gained about complex social phenomena through the use of qualitative, especially interpretive and ethnographic research methods, in the social sciences.

Professor Mehta has previously taught in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Scripps College in Claremont, USA (2010-2012) and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (2012-2020).