Vidhu Priya Mukundan

Vidhu Priya Mukundan is a Summer in the Field Fellow, 2024 and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Her research seeks to understand the understudied gendered element of clientelism in urban democracies. With her work, Vidhu aims to better understand the social and structural barriers to women’s access to the state and how women mobilize in response to these barriers.

For her Summer in the Field Fellowship, Vidhu intends to conduct fieldwork to understand how women participate in claim-making in Hyderabad, India and whether women’s social networks significantly improve their interaction with the state. She will leverage the presence of women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) in India to understand the role of social networks and their potential as political intermediaries. Vidhu plans to conduct a survey of 400 individuals residing in impoverished areas, followed by focus group discussions and shadowing SHGs to understand how they operate in the presence of clientelistic networks.