My areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political theory.  I also study contemporary issues such as environmental justice, food politics and mass incarceration, with an emphasis on the intersection of scholarship and activism. My research appears in journals such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory & Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity, among others.

I am the Co-Founding Director of UCR's path-breaking LIFTED program, which offers a BA degree to incarcerated students.

My newest book, Freedom Inside?: Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), is the winner of the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award, and received honorable mentions for the 2023 Association of American Publishers (AAP) PROSE award and the 2023 Lee Ann Fujii Award. It offers a combination of personal narrative and scholarly research in order to examine the role of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons.  The book explores both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation when taught in prisons in different ways. It is is based on four years of immersion in prisons and prison volunteer communities, along with ethnographic work inside a jail, and over sixty in-depth interviews with those who teach and practice inside prisons.  It interweaves academic narratives with personal experiences of collaboration with volunteers and incarcerated practitioners.

My first book, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford University Press, 2011), asked the question of what it might mean for the very practices of political theorizing to be cosmopolitan.  It suggested that such a vision of political theory is intimately linked to methodological questions about what is commonly called comparative political theory--namely, the turn beyond ideas and modes of inquiry determined by traditional Western scholarship. 

I am also the editor of Fred Dallmayr: Critical Phenomenology, Cross-Cultural Theory, Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2017), which honors the work of the renowned political theorist.

You can learn more about my publications (and access links to most of them) under the Research tab on this webpage.

Image: Tin Thang