Tanushree Kaushal

Tanushree Kaushal is a Visiting Lecturer in International Relations & Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She recently completed her PhD summa cum laude from the same institution, where she was affiliated with the Gender Centre and the Centre for Finance and Development. Her research spans international and feminist political economy, sociology of finance, and postcolonial studies of capitalism.

Her academic journey includes:

• PhD in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (defended May 16, 2025)
• Visiting research fellow at the University of Edinburgh
• Visiting research fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi

Kaushal's research examines how financial value is generated through the transformation of social, moral, and political values, with particular attention to the often-invisible forms of labor that financial intermediaries perform. Her doctoral work traced the financialisation of microcredit from West Bengal to Geneva through a year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. She employs diverse research methods including ethnography, photo elicitation, interviews, and financial dataset analysis across geographical contexts from Geneva's financial hubs to microfinance institutions in West Bengal, India.

Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on gendered labor in finance, imperial legacies in contemporary finance, microfinance regulation in India, and women's everyday practices across financial registers. Her work critically examines how finance claims to solve poverty and gender inequality while revealing the contradictions within social finance systems.

Among her notable achievements is completing her PhD summa cum laude with the thesis titled 'Social Finance in India: Coloniality, Gender and Labour Transformations of Values into Value'.

Kaushal is currently preparing a book on women's vernacular critiques of financial concepts and the gendered labor of producing financial value. Fluent in English, Hindi, and French, she bridges theoretical frameworks from feminist political economy and postcolonial theory with empirical research on financial practices across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.