Dr. Kimberly Walters

Kimberly Walters's research probes the unexpected ways that marginalized women in South India shape transnational humanitarianism. She is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at California State University, Long Beach. She earned a PhD in psychological anthropology from the University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development; an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; and a BA in socio-cultural anthropology from Brigham Young University.

Walters's scholarship is grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Supported by the National Science Foundation and other fellowships, she lived in Hyderabad from 2009 through mid-2013, working alongside community-based organizations in Hyderabad and Rajahmundry. She attended meetings aimed at empowering sex workers, accompanied outreach teams on condom distribution, and conducted scores of interviews. Walters returned for follow-up fieldwork in 2016 and again in 2018-2019 when she and a research team spent time inside anti-trafficking shelters with voluntary sex workers who have been detained for forced rehabilitation as “victims of trafficking” under India’s ITPA. Throughout, Walters attended closely to how women themselves articulated and intervened in competing narratives of rescue and rights.

Walters has published in Economic and Political Weekly, Signs, Anthropological Quarterly, and Contemporary South Asia among others, and she has contributed writing and editing to open Democracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. Her forthcoming ethnography, Rescued from Rights: Sex Work and Anti-Trafficking in South India, examines how the global anti-trafficking apparatus has worked to strip the very women it claims to rehabilitate of their autonomy. Two of Walters’s research articles, alongside those of several of her colleagues, were cited by the Supreme Court of India in May 2026 in Prajwala v. Union of India, a landmark judgment affirming that voluntary adult sex workers cannot be forcibly rescued or detained against their will.

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