Riya Chaudhary
- Email: bnrsc@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Understanding Community Healthcare Worker's experiences in India: A study of Accredited Social Health Activist
- Supervisors: Dr Helen Norman, Professor Kate Hardy, Dr Asiya Islam
Profile
I joined the PhD program in Business and Economic Studies in the People, Work, and Employment (PWED) department of LUBS in October 2023, funded by the People, Work, and Employment Department Scholarship.
My research focuses on understanding what shapes women healthcare workers participation in the workforce, particularly within the gendered nature of care work and state-led development policies. My analysis also looks at how state power and agency excercised within that power intersect with each other.
Before commencing my PhD journey, I worked for two years from 2019 to 2021 in the Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Project initiative by the National Rural Livelihood Mission, a poverty eradication program in India. I worked there with the women to set up enterprises in the Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh, India. Moving to the academic and research space, I worked at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, as an Academic and Research Associate. I coordinated with over 15 community-based organisations to distribute COVID-19 safety equipment kits in rural India to frontline health Workers (FLHWs). I have also worked on a research project to understand the working conditions of the FLHWs and measures that can be taken to improve them.
Research interests
My research interest areas are gender, care work, intersectionality, welfare state policies, informal economy, labour market, labour force participation, decolonial feminism, ethnography, Qualitative research
Conference presentation:
- Work Employment and Society (WES), BSA, Sept 2025
Qualifications
- M.A in Social Work (Livelihoods & Social Entrepreneurship), Tata Institute of Social Sciences,Mumbai
- Bachelor of Engineering- Information Technology