Prof. Paromita Sanyal is a professor of sociology at Florida State University. She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BA from Presidency College, Kolkata.
Prof. Sanyal’s research lies at the intersection of economic sociology, development, deliberative democracy, and gender, with a sustained focus on how people living under conditions of structural inequality pursue agency, mobility, and collective power. Her work spans the Global South and the United States, examining microfinance and women’s empowerment in rural India, self-help groups and gender justice in India, household debt and financial precarity among working-class households in urban India, and platform labor and its consequences in India and the U.S. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India.
She is the author/co-author of several books with Cambridge University Press: Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India (2014), which won the American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Book Award in the Sociology of Development category; Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (2019); and Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar. Another book, Rethinking Credit: Shaping Solutions to Social Problems, is currently under preparation.
Prof. Sanyal has held faculty positions at Cornell University and Wesleyan University, and has collaborated on research funded by the Social Science Research Council, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the Gates Foundation, among others. For over a decade, she was a research consultant to the World Bank’s Development Research Group. She has also presented her research at the United Nations, the World Bank, and major international scholarly venues.
Prof. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating how low-income communities in India are experiencing the digital transformation of finance, with the focus being on digital payment systems and AI-enabled credit. India, the world’s fastest-growing fintech market, offers a critical site for understanding the opportunities and challenges of technology-driven financial inclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the study is examining how low-income publics adopt, adapt to, or resist digital financial tools, and how their responses are shaped by social, infrastructural, and moral–economic contexts. The research is bridging scholarship on financial practices and technological innovation, while informing policy by highlighting barriers to adoption, risks of exclusion, and strategies for ethical fintech design.