Harsha is from Chennai, India. He has a bachelor's and a master's degree in History from the University of Madras and University of Delhi respectively. In his master's, he focused on modern India, writing papers in the fields of economic, political, and cultural history. Between 2013 and 2017, he was an activist-researcher in Chennai, India working with informal waste workers (waste pickers). During this time he developed an abiding interest in the dynamics of labor, capital, informality and caste/class politics as they play out in the city's Neoliberalizing waste-scapes. In the Ph.D., he hopes to substantially deepen this engagement through research that foregrounds the histories, spatialities, and work of indigenous waste pickers, including historical geographies of their migrations into cities as well as the spaces, times, and relationships that contour their life and work in the modern Indian city.