Riya Raphael is an early-career researcher from Delhi, India, and is currently based at the Division of Gender Studies, Department of Sociology, Lund University. In particular, she is interested in developing empirical and theoretical tools to foster equitable labour processes and build worker-centric approaches.  

Key research areas

• Labour and intersectionality
• Feminist political economy
• Waste, discard studies, waste pickers organisations
• Postgrowth, degrowth, eco-social approaches

 Current research project

• ‘Valuing waste’ project explores how waste pickers organisations demand the recognition of their labour, advocate for gender equality within waste supply chains, and pursue sustainable waste management strategies. This is funded by Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council) (2025-2027).

Previous research

Raphael's postdoctoral reseach was with the Postgrowth Welfare Systems project (2022-2024) at the School of Social Work. This was funded by the Excellence Programme for Sustainable Development, Lund University.

• The project examined the possibilities of building environmentally sustainable and socially equitable welfare systems. Raphael's role was to bring in ecofeminist perspectives on labour, care economies and anti-colonial perspectives on socio-environmental issues.

Raphael's PhD thesis, Circles of Value (2021), followed the everyday working lives of used-clothes traders, pheriwale, in Delhi, India.

• Pheriwale are one of the visibily women-dominated street trading groups in the city. They remain largely invisibilised within the studies on political economy, yet they play a major role in the circulation of massive amounts of used-clothes which become part of the global garment industry, as raw materials and fabrics.
• Theoretically, the thesis analysed social theories of value by accounting for the contextual intersectionality of gender, class and caste (in the Indian case).

Background

• Raphael completed her bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Kirori Mal College, Delhi University.
• Her master’s education involved one year of training in sociology at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics (DSE), followed by a master’s degree in Global Studies from the Graduate School, Lund University.

Areas of teaching

• Labour, ecology, and migration
• Feminist political economy
• Gender, globalisation and critical development perspectives
• Socio-political approaches to global value chains, production networks, supply chains
• Qualitative methods (feminist methodology, fieldwork, types of interviews, qualitative analysis, discourse analysis)
• Theories and philosophies of science
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches
• Nordic welfare model