Deepika Padmanabhan
Deepika Padmanabhan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on the politics of language ideology, state responsiveness and internal migration. In her dissertation project, she uses mixed methods — including interviews, archival research, and experiments — to study how national and subnational political elites use state machinery to influence the everyday linguistic choices of citizens in multilingual contexts, and consequently their identities. She is interested in how these processes are constrained by specific histories of linguistic nationalism, which shape how languages are perceived and the kinds of politics that they are associated with. She focuses specifically on Tamil and Kannada language movements in Southern India, and their contemporary manifestations. Apart from her interest in linguistic politics, she conducts research on the politics of non-news media and fandom. She holds a BA in Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and Master’s degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Politics, New York University.
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