Shivani Choudhary

Shivani Choudhary is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology. Her dissertation aims to understand and explain the relationship between politics, elections, and democracy. By employing a comparative moving ethnography approach, her work proposes elaborating on this connection by analyzing the electoral campaign performances of political leaders and the responses of the audience present at those campaign programs. She focuses on the Indian national elections (2024) and certain state elections (Bihar) in India as field sites for her research. Additionally, to decode the debates around election campaigns, she undertakes a longitudinal data analysis (2011-2024) of all campaign speeches by national leaders on social media and the virtual audience engagement with them across various platforms.

Her other project involves conducting participant observation and interviews to understand the meaning of yoga for the yoga practitioners in spiritual, religious, mental, bodily, and political contexts.