Nicole Rigillo

Nicole Rigillo is a fifth year PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at McGill University. Her doctoral research is situated at the intersection of the anthropology of economics, medicine, and knowledge, and examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a novel form of governance in Bangalore, India. Her dissertation situates ethnographic accounts of CSR programs providing various forms of support to populations defined as “in need” within a historical analysis of shifts in techniques of welfare provision in Mysore State (present-day Karnataka) throughout the twentieth century.  Through explorations of local and transnational CSR programs aiming to empower and improve the health of urban female garment factory workers, the residents of a rural district, and children attending government schools across Bangalore, she gestures to the diverse ways in which the logic and practice of CSR is forging novel relations of responsibility and forms of personhood in India today, and modifying the meaning of society and the market in the process.