Dr Reetika Subramanian

My research interests include gender, climate change adaptation, early marriage, migration, social reproduction and South Asia. 

My doctoral research, which was anchored at the intersections of marriage migration, girlhood and labour studies, made visible the labour and experiences of adolescent girls in the context of a climate crisis. I combined a multi-sited feminist ethnography with an informed interpretation of community women’s oral folk songs of labour, to understand the complex ways in which early marriage is used as an institutional means to produce and sustain a particular workforce of adolescent wife-workers in capitalist labour markets, in India’s historically drought-prone and caste-ridden Marathwada region. As an offshoot of my doctoral project, I setup the Climate Brides podcast with the support of the University of Cambridge Public Engagement Starter fund and the Cambridge Reproduction Conceptions Fund.

Parallelly, I have also written extensively on the practice of female genital cutting in India. I have published journalistic pieces, a research study with 200+ participants from the community, and a peer-reviewed article (forthcoming, Feminist Review) on the debates and dialogues on the highly contested practice.