Kunal Joshi is PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins.
He works with pilgrimage priests in the North Indian city of Allahabad, and his current research focuses on the genealogies of specific ritual/ecological rhythms, and the conceptual architecture one might be able to unearth if one takes seriously pilgrimage priests’ ritual/ intellectual traditions.
Before coming to Hopkins, his earlier research focussed on the so-called ‘informal’ economy in India, as he considered street vendors’ struggles to obtain a legal right to work, and through the figure of the street vendor, the conditional nature of citizenship in contemporary India.
As part of the Writing Seminars, he is teaching a class titled ‘Memes and Metaculture: Criticism in the Age of Content’.
As a Deans Teaching Fellow, he taught an undergraduate seminar titled: Reading Gandhi in the Contemporary Moment (Fall 2023).
Before coming to Hopkins, he taught a Critical Writing Seminar at Ashoka University’s Young India Fellowship (2015 – 2017), titled “Informality and the City”.
Forthcoming “Memory, Genealogy, and the Custodians of Tradition: A Study of Pilgrimage Ledgers in North India.” Solicited for inclusion the forthcoming volume Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia, edited by Dr. Nitin Sinha .
2023 Power ≠ Knowledge: Governmentality in North Indian Pilgrimage Ledgers” In “data/Big Data in the field” edited by Naveeda Khan, American Ethnologist website. https://americanethnologist.org/data-big-data-in-the-field/power-≠-knowledge-governmentality-in-north-indian-pilgrimage-ledgers
2022 (co-authored with Naveeda Khan) “Commentary on the Land-Water Nexus.”Geoforum, 131: 232-233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.11.015.
2018 "‘Conditional’ Citizens? Hawkers in the Streets (and the Courts) of Contemporary India." Articulo - Journal of Urban Research, 17-18. https://doi.org/10.4000/articulo.3383
Anthropology of religion, historical anthropology, ritual, myth, memory, law, urbanization, informal economies, ordinary ethics, South Asia, India