Isha Bhallamudi is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at UC Irvine. She studies how internet platforms shape work and social life, with particular attention to gender, technology, work, wellbeing, and culture in majority worlds. She is proficient in range of qualitative and quantitive methods, with particular interest in community-based and participatory approaches. She has worked on a range of projects around these topics and others, with a variety of collaborators and teams across South Asia, U.K., U.S. and Africa.
Her dissertation project, which was supported in part by the UC Noyce Initiative, examines the gender dynamics of platform work in India, with a focus on organizational cultures, intersectional inequalities, and strategies of resistance against algorithmic control. It is a mixed-methods study with over 175 gig workers, platform managers and union organizers in Mumbai. Sh is deeply invested in applying historical-comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives to platform research, including showing how platform work today marks a return to some of the core features of previous work paradigms.