• Social Mobility
• Social Stratification
• Class
• Occupational Aspirations
• Residential Segregation
• Education
• Research Methods

Aashti worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management (GITAM), Bengaluru, for two years before joining Azim Premji University.

She has over four years of experience in the development sector as a research associate, where her primary area of focus was education but she was also involved in other projects, such as assessing the impact of cash transfers on the age of marriage of women in Haryana. Her work has led her to conduct extensive field research in Rajasthan, Haryana, Odisha, and Delhi, where she has used both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Aashti completed her MA, MPhil and PhD from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has a BA in Economics from Hindu College, University of Delhi. 

Her area of expertise is social mobility and social stratification. Her doctoral thesis interrogated the social mobility of Muslims by examining their employment aspirations and choices. 

She is presently working on diverse but related topics such as the role of social embeddedness and social capital in facilitating the mobility of Muslims living in segregated spaces and the choice of self-employment among Muslim women in segregated residential spaces of Delhi. 

She is also interested in understanding the career pathways that education creates for people from different social backgrounds and the educational strategies of the middle class where she wants to examine the extent of social reproduction. 

She has published material on the role of self-employment in facilitating the social mobility of Muslims, mixed methods research, the concept of frustrated freedom, the Muslim middle class, and the question of school dropout among Muslim youth.