Jahnavi Uppuleti
Supervisors
Professor Sondra L. Hausner
Professor Anthony G. Reddie
Biography
Jahnavi's DPhil research is an ethnographic study of the caste, gender, and religious subjectivities of Dalit (Madiga) Christian women in South India. Based on long-term fieldwork in a caste-segregated neighbourhood in a small town, her research examines how everyday life unfolds under conditions of sustained caste- and gender-based marginalisation.
At the centre of her thesis is the concept of everyday grief, through which she examines how women navigate ongoing, ordinary forms of loss. Rather than focusing on discrete moments of bereavement, her work attends to losses that accumulate over time, i-e, losses of self-respect, dignity, personhood, aspirations, relationships, and security, and asks how these are recognised, managed, and endured in everyday life. Her research examines how caste, religion, and gender influence women’s perceptions of loss and their responses to it.
By foregrounding the everydayness of the neighbourhood, her work examines how religious life is lived within spaces marked by structural marginalisation, and how Christianity becomes part of women’s ongoing negotiations with grief, vulnerability, and endurance. Her research contributes to anthropological conversations on subjectivity, lived religion, structural violence, and everyday life, with particular attention to the psychological and affective dimensions of marginalisation.
Alongside her doctoral research, she is interested in comparative and global approaches to understanding how grief produced through structural marginalisation is lived and experienced, particularly in relation to religion and everyday life.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a journalist and freelance researcher, contributing to publications including Al Jazeera, VICE, The Caravan, The Wire, The News Minute, and Outlook.
Educational Background
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BA in Mass Communications, Symbiosis International University
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MA in Sociology, University of Hyderabad
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DPhil in Theology and Religion, University of Oxford (ongoing)
Research Interests
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Anthropology of religion, Ethnography, Lived religion, Dalit Christianity, Gender, grief, and subjectivity
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