Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, Sohini Kar focuses on the impact of increasing financialization on poverty and development programs. She is completing a book project looking at commercial microfinance in India that is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Indian city of Kolkata. The book examines how lenders and borrowers of microfinance negotiate the divergent ethics of financial sustainability and locally constituted obligations of social relationships, and demonstrates how commercial microfinance tends to reinforce rather than challenge structural forms of inequality. She is currently working on a new project examining the impact of finance on health care financing for the poor in India.