Sethi is a Sociologist by training. She has taught at the Centre for Comparative Religions, Jamia, between 2005 and 2017, and currently teaches at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies. A fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library between 2013-15, she also helps edit Biblio, India’s preeminent book review magazine. Sethi was visiting faculty at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad from 2020 to 2023, where she founded and headed the Centre for Criminal Justice Reform and Research. 

Sethi’s research interests encompass a wide range: from gender, politics and religion, to law and counterterrorism. Her doctoral work was an ethnographic study of the nuns of the Jain tradition. In trying to understand the preponderance of women in the Jain mendicant orders, it interrogated on the one hand the dominant theories of renunciation, and on the other the liberal-Kantian ideas of women’s agency.

She has written extensively on the discourse of counterterrorism and the legal regimes that accompany it. The current work examines the relationship between religion and law. Rather than seeing it as a case of competing sovereignties, the focus is on situating this relationship in a wider concatenation of ideas – tolerance, diversity, reform, majoritarianism, Indian secularism etc.

She is the author of Kafkaland: Law, Prejudice and Counterterrorism in India (Three Essays, 2014) and Escaping the World: Women Renouncers among Jains (Routledge, 2012). A volume of essays edited by her, titled, Communities and Courts: Religion and Law in Modern India has been published by Routledge UK in 2022.