Current Research

1. Global suburbanisms: governance, land, and infrastructure in the 21st century. SSHRC-MCRI Project. Co-applicant

This multi-year project brings together a interdisciplinary team of researchers from around the world and maps the processes, practices, and politics of suburbanization as it unfolds in different forms. Exploring the gated communities of the global north as well as the slums and suburbs of the south, the project through diverse methodologies takes stock of worldwide suburban developments while analyzing their governance models, land use, infrastructure and suburban everyday life.

I will be the Project Lead for South Asia as well as Waste and Sewage themes.

Students interested in these or related issues are encouraged to contact me.

2. Changing Urban Frontiers: The Case of Gurgaon, India

This research project explores the changing frontiers of urbanization in India. In particular, it focuses on the politcs of urban governance with special reference to wastewater and sewage management in Gurgaon

3. Nature Matters: Articulations of Nature, Place, and Gender in Uttarakhand Himalayas, India.

In looking through ethnographic and historical lenses, this research project explores how the colonial discourses and practices of ‘conserving,’ ‘disciplining,’ and ‘improving’ nature (and people) have left lasting legacies that not only inform contemporary cultural politics of labor and livelihood but also the surveillance and managerial practices of the Indian state. It draws from feminist and post-colonial theory, political ecology, and critical race theory and crosses disciplinary boundaries of cultural geography, anthropology, women studies, and environmental studies.

4. Live Stock: When Humans, Cattle, Hybrids, and Jerseys Meet in Kumaon Himalayas, India.

This project addresses how anthropology can draw on and develop further the ‘more-than-human’ analytics for understanding the society/nature relationship and focuses its attention to the cattle in the Himalayas. It considers the non-human, and particularly the animal, as a serious matter of concern and views it as constitutive of social and political networks of everyday life.

5. Neoliberal Natures

This project examines the neoliberal shifts in environmental governance, namely participatory forestry, microplanning, and community based management.

Related to this work, I am currently involved in a Major Collaborative Research Initiative on "The Mobilization of Knowledge in Ecologies on the Edge." For this project, I will be working with a wide network of scholars from around the world to examine how new forms of knowledge production and circulation, namely through monitoring and certification systems are producing a new politics of knowledge and practices of ecological governance. I will be focusing in the Himalayas. Students interested in the area encouraged to contact me.

Selected Publications

2014 "Ethnographies of the Political: Honouring Malcolm Blinco" Special section edited by Shubhra Gururani & Karl Schmid Anthropologica 57(1).

2014 "Gender in the Himalaya: Cultural Politics of Gendered Identity, Place, and Positionality" Special Section: Gender in the Himalaya edited by Kim Berry & Shubhra Gururani Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 34(1): 36-42.

2014 "Geographies that Make Resistance”: Remapping the Politics of Gender and Place in Uttarakhand, India" Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 34(1): 68-79.

2014 "Introduction: New Frontiers of Ecological Knowledge: Co-producing Knowledge and Governance in Asia" Special section: Ecological knowledge in Asia edited by Shubhra Gururani & Peter Vandergeest Conservation & Society 12(4): 343-51.

2010 "Fostering Community, Instituting Neoliberal Natures in the Forests of Uttarakhand, India." Under Review

2009 “Troubled Nature”: Some Reflections on the Changing Nature of the Millennial City (Gurgaon), India. In The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment. Ingrid Stefanovic and Stephen Scharper (Eds.) University of Toronto Press. Toronto.

2009 “Gendered Geographies: Women and the Making of Utttarakhand, India.” Under Review

2002 “Constructions of Third World Women’s Knowledge in the Development Discourse.” International Social Science Journal. Special Issue on Indigenous Knowledges. No. 173. September.

2002 “Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered Practices of Labor and Livelihood in the Forests of Kumaon Himalayas, India.” Gender, Place, and Culture. Volume 9, No.3.

2000 “Regimes of Control, Strategies of Access: Practices of Property and Community in Uttarakhand Himalayas, India.” In Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India. Arun Agrawal & K. Sivaramakrishnan (Eds.) Duke University Press. Durham, NC.

1997 “The ‘New Traditionalist’ Discourse of Indian Environmentalism." Journal of Peasant Studies with Subir Sinha and Brian Greenberg. Volume 24, No. 3, April 1997. pp. 65 - 99.