This edited volume moves the study of South Asia to the center of sociological analysis, bringing together recent scholarship across sites in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as in Ethiopia and the USA. This book situates the project of decolonizing the discipline within a rich transnational intellectual legacy and reveals how South Asia offers a uniquely generative site from which to rethink sociological practice. Recognizing local and global influences at their specific sites, the contributing authors highlight the historical ravages of colonialism and imperialism, modernization projects of the postcolonial era, and the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life under neoliberalism today. The sociology of South Asia centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by local and global systems of power in order to produce knowledge that advances interconnected projects of liberation.

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk-sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis.

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk-sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis.

This edited volume moves the study of South Asia to the center of sociological analysis, bringing together recent scholarship across sites in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as in Ethiopia and the USA. This book situates the project of decolonizing the discipline within a rich transnational intellectual legacy and reveals how South Asia offers a uniquely generative site from which to rethink sociological practice. Recognizing local and global influences at their specific sites, the contributing authors highlight the historical ravages of colonialism and imperialism, modernization projects of the postcolonial era, and the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life under neoliberalism today. The sociology of South Asia centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by local and global systems of power in order to produce knowledge that advances interconnected projects of liberation.