Research Team

Monica Biradavolu, Ph.D., Lead Ethnographer

Monica Biradavolu is Post-doctoral Associate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) at Yale University and also the Lead Ethnographer for Project Parivartan. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University and an undergraduate degree, also in Sociology, from the University of Delhi.

Dr. Biradavolu's substantive interests center on development and globalization, with a focus on India. Her research on two critically important sectors – the economy and public health – gives her an advantageously broad lens to understand India's development spectrum. Her dissertation relied on 18 months of fieldwork in Silicon Valley, California, and Bangalore, India to understand a sector where India is doing exceedingly well – the information technology industry – and the emergence and influence of transnational Indian entrepreneurs. A revised version of the dissertation, at the interstices of migration, higher education and the software industry, will soon be published by Cambria Press.

The postdoctoral research through Project Parivartan has allowed her to view up-close another angle of India's development sector – the arena of public health – and its intersection with issues of gender, stigma, vulnerability and global funding for HIV/AIDS. As Lead Ethnographer for the project, Dr. Biradavolu spent two years in Rajahmundry, India, conducting and supervising field research on an implementing NGO's efforts to prevent HIV among female sex workers, using a community mobilization and empowerment model. The research included observation of the day-to-day activities – the struggles, successes and setbacks – of the implementing NGO and the birth and growth of a fledgling sex worker organization. She also conducted interviews with sex workers, madams, police, brokers, clients and other actors who form a part of the local sex trade.

Presently, Dr. Biradavolu is based at Yale, and is working towards completing (for publication) two papers on which she is the first author and others where she is co-author.

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