Gargi’s research focuses on thrifting in Bangalore and its role as an urban, classed, and gendered practice. Through curated thrift stores and pop-ups, she examines how people engage with second-hand clothing emotionally and in everyday life. Her study highlights thrifting as a socially differentiated practice beyond economic necessity, tied to lifestyle, sustainability, and self-expression.

Lakshmi is exploring Madiwala, Bangalore’s “Mini Kerala” to understand how affective belonging influences migrant lives. She looks at how cultural familiarity offers comfort while normalising housing precarity and classed inequalities. The ones who contribute to the materialisation of home-making, do they actually get to enjoy the comfort of the home they helped create? 

Akshara’s research contributes to cultural geography, food studies, and urban anthropology by foregrounding the cultural politics of coffee in Karnataka. It reveals how coffee mediates relationships between class identities, rural-urban flows, and cosmopolitan belonging. Ultimately, it argues that coffee is not merely a beverage but a socio-cultural artefact embodying histories of land, people, & power.

Vedanth aims to examine slums or spatially segregated areas in Bangalore. His research focuses on understanding these spaces as economic centres or financial institutions, which are expected to produce some capital required by the city. Do these spaces enter into a form of limbo of being excluded yet wanted by the city?

Aashi is interested in food, leisure, and urban studies. Her project maps leisure practices in public spaces, with a focus on communities in Cubbon Park. It documents how leisure spaces and social gatherings foster community and address urban loneliness.

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S.K. Meenakshi’s capstone project examines rock culture in Bangalore through a study of Pecos and Hard Rock Café. It explores how subcultural identity and assimilation are negotiated within these spaces, focusing on language, class, gender, accessibility, and the socio-political dynamics that shape participation and belonging.

Chetana Agnihotri is a final-year postgraduate. Her capstone research is about the identity of a Bangalorean, exploring the questions of urban belonging and spatial identity in the city of Bengaluru.

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​Rimi's research area is migrant studies, cultural belonging in urban spaces, and everyday life. For her capstone, she studies Northeastern grocery stores in Bangalore, focusing on how Northeastern migrants access these spaces and how location, cost, and familiar food shape their sense of home in the city.

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Kavya explores street art in Malleshwaram, Bangalore, to understand how public walls shape everyday experiences of the city. She examines how murals transform ordinary spaces into shared sites of meaning, emotion, and interaction, and how visual culture reshapes the relationship between people, place, and urban life.

Apeksha’s research studies Plagueamma shrines in Bengaluru as living cultural and material archives of epidemic memory. It examines how disease is sacralized and remembered. By mapping their spatial distribution, the project situates these shrines within histories of urban expansion, caste marginalisation, and migration, arguing that they actively shape metropolitan space by sustaining community networks, local economies, and forms of belonging, offering a critical lens on urban memory and postcolonial processes of city-making.

Shraddha Gupta is a final-year postgraduate student researching visual and auditory overstimulation in Bengaluru within the context of the neoliberal “world-class” city. Her work examines how sensory excess reshapes everyday life and disproportionately impacts existing communities, highlighting its effects on urban identity and inequality.

Shruti is working on a study of Depoliticized Theatre in Bengaluru, majorly focussing on English and Hindi Theatre Productions. By examining the politics of theatre productions, theatre practitioners, audiences and theatre spaces, she is trying to reveal a strategic reconfiguration of Theatre due to Bengaluru's migration-fueled politically diverse population.

Under the broad and evolving discipline of queer studies, this particular research titled “Queer Community in Bangalore: Affective Sexual Geographies” analyses parallel queer communities existing within the city’s modern and inclusive image. From spaces like Cafes, Party Spaces and Parks offering entertainment to NGOs that invite and offer free aid, the queer culture of Bangalore is studied for its lived reality of varying degrees of comfort, security and politics arising from within it. Queer Leisure translates into resistance and Queer Joy translates into activism. This research questions whether this stands true for Bangalore.