Kalpana Karunakaran is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Her research and writings are in the domain of gender, labour, microcredit, women’s trade unions, and solidarity-based movements. She writes about women’s lives with a focus on the intersections of the personal and the political. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India (2017), the Tamil memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A Daughter’s Portrait of Mythily Sivaraman; 2018), and A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras (2025).