Parikh's research focuses on the intersection of local transformations; global processes; and structures of inequalities surrounding issues of sexuality, particularly gender, sexual and reproductive health, regulation, courtship and romance, and marriage. Using ethnographic and historical methods and critical theory, my research in eastern Uganda focuses on how regimes of regulation and discourses of sexuality have shifted since independence and, more recently, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Theoretical questions revolve around how differentiated actors appropriate increasingly accessible, yet often contradictory, images and discourses of sexuality into their everyday debates, conversations, and ideas of sexual relationships. She highlights the ways in which various state, family, health, and local agents attempt to regulate meanings of sexuality and how such struggles are connected to increased anxiety stimulated by sexual health concerns, commercialization of the local economy, and Uganda's connection to global cultural flows. Her current work examines youth romance as written in their love letters, and attempts to regulate sexuality through the age of consent law. I pay particular attention to the articulations of historic inequalities such as sex, age, and class in sexual relationships.

In her fieldwork she integrates ethnographic research methods with active research techniques. By doing so, she enters into dialogue with debates about the role of anthropology in public health and anthropological critiques of development. She has begun further research on infidelity and HIV transmission and the social history of sexuality in rural post-colonial Uganda. Broadly speaking, She is interested in sexual and reproductive health issues, and regimes of sexuality.

Her courses cross into African and Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, International and Area Studies, Social Thought and Analysis, and the History and Philosophy of Science