I am a PhD candidate at the Gender Centre and Centre for Finance & Development at the Geneva Graduate Institute. I am a scholar in the politics and sociology of finance and capitalism and combine approaches from political theory, anthropology, political economy and sociology of markets. I am particularly interested in the relations between labour and finance, including hierarchies of labour that re-inscribe racialised and gendered power relations. In my PhD, I ethnographically follow financial investments from the Global North to the Global South, tracing multiple levels of labour that shape finance. Methodologically, I study 'up' (financial and state elites) and 'down' (women borrowers and households taking credit). I have published on themes ranging from politics of Indian microfinance, imperial residues of contemporary developmental finance, everyday practices of financial inclusion and social finance investors' navigation between data, faith and activism. I am currently preparing a book on the transformation of values into financial value, which follows the labour of value transformation in social finance from Geneva to West Bengal.
2020-2025: PhD Politics, Geneva Graduate Institute
Swiss National Science Foundation's Doc-ch grant: Gendered Governance of Microfinance
PhD Affiliate, Gender Centre and the Centre for Finance & Development
Dissertation: Social Finance in India: Coloniality, Gender and Labour Transformations of Values into Value
Committee: Prof. Elisabeth Prügl, Dr. Anna-Riikka Kauppinen and Dr. Kate Maclean
2024: Visiting Fellow, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi
2023-2024: Visiting Fellow, University of Edinburgh,
Swiss National Science Foundation Doc.ch Mobility grant
2021-2022: Researcher, FinPharm Project on financialisation of global health
2021: Fieldwork funding, The Puzzle of Unspent Funds Project
2020-2022: Teaching Assistant, Geneva Graduate Institute
Courses in critical finance studies, gender and IR, global governance
2019-2021: Researcher in feminist political economy, Women's International League for Peace & Freedom
2019-2020: Research Assistant, Gender Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute
Research on gender in international and humanitarian law
You can find a complete CV here.
You can reach me at tanushree.kaushal@graduateinstitute.ch or follow me on Bluesky.