Pranathi Diwakar is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher and instructor at the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersections of music, media, and performance, caste and social inequality, and urban life. Her ethnographic book project investigates two music scenes situated in the southern Indian city of Chennai to uncover the ways that caste, distinction, and placemaking reinscribe or challenge sociospatial and symbolic boundaries of caste. She received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago, where her dissertation won the 2022 Saller Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in the Social Sciences.