Arjun Shankar, Ph.D.

I am an assistant professor in Culture and Politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. My work falls into three broad areas. First, I am concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial and caste capitalism. In my current book project, Brown Saviors and their Others, I take India's burgeoning help economy, specifically the education NGO sector, as a site from which to interrogate these ideas. Second, I am a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker who has been interested in developing decolonial, participatory visual methodologies. Finally, I am an advocate for Curiosity Studies (with Perry Zurn), an emerging interdisciplinary field which challenges us to think anew about scholarly production, pedagogic praxis, and the political role of the academician. I ask: what might a radical curiosity make possible and what political, economic, and social constraints prevent the flourishing of curiosity?