Neethi’s interests broadly pertain to globalisation and labour, with a focus on labour informality, analysing diverse sectors and their associated informal workers. Striving to understand the nuances of labour-management relations and everyday labour politics in these sectors, Neethi focuses on informality among women workers and also various forms of upcoming informal or alternative labour associations/organisations, and their unique labour response strategies. Neethi’s research, for over a decade, has covered a wide variety of informal workers and sectors including garment, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vendors, and recently, municipal sanitation workers and sex workers.
For her doctoral work in this field, she was awarded a Fulbright DPR Fellowship at the University of Georgia in the United States for a year. Apart from a string of international peer-reviewed journal articles, Neethi has also authored ‘Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective’, published under Oxford University Press in 2016. At IIHS, she is involved in designing and carrying out research on various aspects of urban employment and labour.
Neethi’s research under PEAK focusses on the historical shaping of textile mills in Bangalore and the deindustrialisation journey of some of these mills.
