Niv Karthikeyan is a graduate student in the History of Science & Medicine, and Ethnicity, Race & Migration programs at Yale. She is preoccupied with questions of pain, data, and medical violence. Her research uses the diasporic figure of the South Asian migrant woman to trace how pain became medicalized and datafied in the United States - intimately shaping how the pain of some gets recognized (or not) and treated (or not) by medical professionals in the present. Lately, Niv has been learning how to be a care-full teacher, and is experimenting with what radical access can look like in the space of the college classroom. It is giving her a lot of joy.
Prior to graduate school, Niv earned a B.S. in Computer Science and History from Caltech, and worked in immigrants’ rights at the ACLU and in community memory-work at the South Asian American Digital Archive. Her work as an academic remains rooted in her commitments to community.