Assistant Professor Global and International Studies
School of Social Sciences

Faculty Associate, Anthropology
School of Social Sciences

Joint Appointment WoS, Criminology, Law & Society
School of Social Ecology

law and society, gender and sexuality, South Asia, postcolonial law and state practices, critical NGO studies, sexuality and governance, regimes of care and carcerality, labor and migration, critical childhood studies..

Website - Detailed Profile

As an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia, my research spans postcolonial law, state practices, courts, policing, sexuality and governance, critical approaches to human rights and humanitarianism, NGOs and transnational activism, sex work, sex trafficking, labor and migration, regimes of care and carcerality, domestic work, child labor, and orphanhood in global contexts.

My interdisciplinary research, based on ethnographic methods and socio-legal analyses and rooted in critical feminist and postcolonial perspectives, is structured around two broad concerns:
1. How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge to imagine prostitution through the contrasting lenses of victimhood and immorality.
2. How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global humanitarian campaigns converge to imagine childhood as a category of vulnerability.

American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), Joseph W. Elder Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (2024)
UCI School of Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award (2023)
UCI Womxn Center for Success Academic Achievement Award (2022)
UCI Hellman Fellowship Award for early career faculty research (2021-22), to support my book manuscript, “Immoral Traffic:" An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India.
UCI School of Social Sciences Dean’s Honoree Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, UCI Celebration of Teaching (2021)

"Immoral Traffic:" An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society.

PRINT PUBLICATIONS

From “house of horrors” to “sensitive” governance: sex workers’ shelter detention in India. Contemporary South Asia (Online First, October 2023).

Ethnography at an Intersection: Law, Anti-Trafficking NGOs, and Prostitution in India, Law and Social Inquiry 48 (1), 66-78, February 2023.
(Part of a symposium on New Directions in Legal Anthropology)

"These Girls Never Give Statements:" Anti-Trafficking Interventions and Victim-Witness Testimony in India," Social Sciences 11 (9): 405, September 2022.
(Part of a Special Issue on Human Trafficking: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts).

Saving the Slaving Child: Domestic Work, Labor Trafficking, and the Politics of Rescue in India, Humanity (An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development), 10 (3), Winter 2019.

Co-authored with Sally E. Merry, The Limits of Consent: Trafficking and the Problem of International Paternalism, in Michael Barnett, ed. (2017). Paternalism Beyond Borders. Cambridge University Press.

ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

Co-authored with Kimberly Walters, “A Recipe for Injustice: India’s New Trafficking Bill Expands a Troubled Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Repatriation Framework,” Open Democracy, July 30, 2018.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/kimberly-walters-vibhuti-ramachandran/recipe-for-injustice-india-s-new-trafficking-bil

“Critical Reflections on Raid and Rescue Operations in New Delhi,” Open Democracy, November 25, 2017.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/vibhuti-ramachandran/critical-reflections-on-raid-and-rescue-operations-in-new-delhi

“Rescued but not Released: the “protective custody” of sex workers in India,”
Open Democracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/vibhuti-ramachandran

"Illegality:" Translation, Fieldsights, Cultural Anthropology online:
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/559-illegality-translation

UCI Hellman Fellowship Award for early career faculty research, 2021-22, to support my book manuscript, "Immoral Traffic:" An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

UCI School of Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award 2023

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6568

Last updated
04/05/2024