My research examines how digital technologies become embedded in everyday life, governance, and public culture. Drawing on ethnographic research, I study how technologies are adopted, negotiated, gendered, repaired, and reimagined in practice.
I am currently a Maitri Fellow at the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne, where I am working on practices of digital authentication in India’s Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System. I examine how the verification of identities and entitlements is reconfiguring citizen-state interactions and shapes everyday experiences of citizenship. I was also the inaugural Women in Tech Fellow (2024), awarded by the Australian Consulate-General in Bengaluru and the Australia India Institute.
Alongside this work, I am building a digital archive of film fandom expressed on the rear of autorickshaws in India. The project examines autos as sites of vernacular visual culture that function as mobile film archives in traffic.
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Commerce and a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Pune, and a PhD in Communication Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. In what now seems like a previous life, I was a journalist with The Indian Express.
I can be reached at preeti [dot] mudliar [at] unimelb [dot] edu [dot] au.
