A. R. Vasavi is a Social Anthropologist based in Karnataka. She received her masters from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and her PhD in Social Anthropology from Michigan State University (USA). She was a faculty with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, from 1997 to 2011, a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Diversity and Religion at Gottingen, Germany. Her academic interests are in sociology of India, agrarian studies, and sociology of education and she has conducted field research in various parts of India. Her publications include Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South India (Oxford University Press 1999), In an Outpost of the Global Economy (co-edited with Carol Upadhya, Routledge, 2008), The Inner Mirror: Translations of Kannada Writings on Society and Culture (The Book Review Press, 2009) and Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India (Three Essays Collective, 2012). In 2010, in collaboration with Padmini Swaminathan, she founded the Network for Rural and Agrarian Studies which focuses on the continuous study and documentation of trends in rural India. The network has recently published the State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020 of which Vasavi is one of the co-authors. A collected volume of her essays on education is forthcoming. She is currently a member of the Punarchith Collective which works on alternative learning and is based in Karnataka.