Chetana Sabnis

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University. My research focuses on how states regulate intimate relationships and construct hierarchies of familial belonging. I am advised by Elisabeth Wood, Joe Fischel, Dara Strolovitch and Egor Lazarev.

I am interested in the ambiguities of everyday life. In my research, this has meant exploring the politics of intimacy, law and society, and feminist and critical theory. Outside of work, this has meant an enduring interest for celebrity gossip, contemporary literary fiction and reality TV.

Prior to Yale, I received an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and an integrated M.A. in Development Studies from IIT Madras. I grew up in Bangalore and now live in Brooklyn with my dog, daughter and partner.

I am more than happy to connect with early career researchers who are looking to explore an academic or policy career. Besides pursuing a Ph.D., I have spent over four years in the development sector working at institutions like the World Bank and J-PAL South Asia. You can contact me at chetana[dot]sabnis[at]yale[dot]edu.

Chetana Sabnis

Dissertation

How do states decide which intimate relationships count as "family"? My dissertation introduces the Intimacy Contract, a framework that illuminates how some intimate relationships receive legal entitlements while others are rendered dispensable. This dynamic becomes visible when we compare officially recognized intimate relationships such as marriages and parent-child relationships to relationships that are arguably as intimate, such as friendships (like in Elena Ferante's My Brilliant Friend) and human-animal relationships (like the ones described in Mary Oliver's Dog Songs). Although these relationships may be comparable in how intimate they are, the state draws an ideological boundary between those it classifies as "family" and those it does not.

I grew interested in this topic during my three months in the British Library archives in 2022 in London where I was struck by the multiple references to "kept women" in colonial British Indian officials' private papers and memoirs: British officials and Indian women certainly had intimate relationships but interestingly, these relationships were rarely recognized as marriages. I became more curious about this dynamic the more content I read on these shadow intimacies like Saba Dewan's Tawaifnama, a rich microhistory of the lives of courtesans in North India, Jennifer Wilson's New Yorker article on Polyamory , and Jennifer Morgan's Reckoning with Slavery, which offers a piercing view into intimate relationships under racial captialism.

To operationalize the Intimacy Contract framework, I use case studies where I focus on "family-like" relationships and how these relationships are treated by courts in various states. I use a combination of computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods to collect and analyze court data on these relationships.

To read my dissertation abstract, click here.

Other Research

  • Narratives of Policing in Colonial India, 1857-1945: A Study on the Relationship between the Police and the State (Jun 2022)

    World over, whether in autocracies or democracies, the police remains a controversial institution. For the multiple instances of horrifying police violence, there invariably exists at least one instance where the police is lauded for conducting CPR on a young civilian found in a lake or for distributing face-masks in a remote village during the pandemic. This institutional capacity to inflict violence and provide welfare is confounding. However, what they do not reveal is the role of the police in relation to the state. The emergence of the police is intertwined with the creation of the state. Attempts to therefore understand the controversial nature of the police will be remiss without considering its relationship to the state. In this paper, I focus on the context of colonial India to explore how in such a contradictory and complicated socio-political setting, police officials made sense of policing in view of their relationship with the state. I find that for police officials, the values and actions that constituted policing were as much motivated by their understanding of society as their understanding of the state. By moving and travelling to different spaces and building relationships with individuals not only in the police but outside as well, police officials developed a granular, sophisticated understanding of what they believed constituted the state. This view helps explain why the police officials are paradoxically as capable of inflicting violence as they are of providing welfare.

  • Analyzing Court Cases using an LLM-with-a-Human-in-the-Loop Approach

    This paper introduces a novel LLM-with-a-human-in-the-loop approach to analyze court cases at scale. Existing judicial decision-making analyses has typically used pattern matching to obtain case detail. However, lexical matches can yield insight to a restricted degree. To capture the semantic meaning in court cases, an LLM-with-a-human-in-the-loop approach is compelling: It enables nuanced data collection while also mitigating hallucinations and enhancing validity. I illustrate the utility of this approach by discussing how I deployed LLMs to collect detailed case information in two contexts: India and the U.S.

Teaching

My teaching philosophy centers on three principles: facilitate critical inquiry, encourage familiarity with key concepts, and a recognition that learning is a personal journey. These are a few of the courses I have helped teach:

  • Politics of Expertise (Fall 2025)
  • Contesting Injustice (Fall 2024)
  • The State, Conflict, and Political Order (Spring 2024)
  • Rise of China (Fall 2023)

CV

For more on my professional and academic life, see my CV.

Last updated: September 2025