Ashima Mittal is a sociocultural anthropologist of capitalism, nature, and ideologies of economic growth in contemporary India. Her first book project, Making Air Breathable, examines the emergence of “the clean-air tech industrial complex”—an interconnected ensemble of technologies, experts, industries, and financial instruments geared toward air pollution mitigation and adaptation—arguing that it constitutes new logics of capitalist ecology-making and future-making. Based on ethnographic and archival work with atmospheric scientists, industrial workers, and entrepreneurs, this research shows that clean air becomes a key source of value-extraction in neoliberal India through its reconstitution as what she calls “a fictitious asset.” While not being a tangible or intangible asset, clean air is nonetheless incorporated into circuits of capital extraction as though it could be owned, leased, and sold for generating rent-like benefits. In 2026–27, she will teach in the Department of Anthropology and in the Self, Culture, and Society course sequence of the Social Sciences Core.