Department of Sociology

Year of Entry: 2020

Archana is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brown University. Her research examines how colonialism, past and present, shapes environmental and development processes. Her dissertation project interrogates how colonialism impacted water management in opposing ways in 20^th century Curaçao – a Caribbean island that transitioned from Dutch colony to a self-governing country within the Dutch Kingdom in this period. In particular, she traces how political-economic forces like multinational corporations and fiscal constraints from the Dutch empire come together with cultural identities and ideas to facilitate the twin developments of desalination and groundwater mismanagement on the island. While this is a historical archival project, she also uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative interview-based methods in her other work. For example, she is collaborating on a project about the legal dimensions of the US environmental state.