Living Botanicals: Blind-led

Tony Kurian is an economic sociologist. He received his PhD from the department of humanities and social sciences at IIT Bombay. He was a Nehru Fulbright doctoral fellow at the department of economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He finished his MPhil degree from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and master’s in development studies from TISS Mumbai. 

In his work, Tony employs sociological tools to understand the functioning of markets. At the core of his research lies the central inquiry into the political nature of market design choices and their consequential impact on market outcomes. How do market design choices, which may appear rational on the surface, conceal their political nature? How does the market interact with existing social structure? He answers these questions by unraveling the inner working of markets, thereby demonstrating the social and political forces that constitute market engineering. 

When not thinking about market design, he is ruminating about ways to use his research skills for furthering the cause of the disability rights movement.