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IDCE Home > Graduate Academics > IDSC > Faculty
Kiran Asher Faculty International Development and Social Change Program IDCE Deparment Clark University
Kiran Asher
Education
Ph.D. in Comparative Politics and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida, 1998
M.A. in Environmental Management from Duke University, 1990
B.A. in the Life Sciences from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, 1987
Research Interests
the complex, contradictory, and constitutive connections between political economy, culture (including gender and race), and nature
Biography
Kiran Asher’s interdisciplinary training is grounded in two decades of field-based research in Latin America and South Asia. While her research interests are diverse, they remain focused on the gendered and raced dimensions of social and environmental change in the global south. Her approaches to these themes emerge from an analytical engagement with postcolonialism, feminism, and Marxism, and her political commitment to social change.
Asher initially noticed the relations between rural peoples and their environment while studying the behavioral ecology of ungulates in western India in the 1980s. But as a biologist, she refused to be “distracted” by social and political issues and kept her attention firmly focused on antelope and deer. However, extensive wildlife conservation-related fieldwork in India and Latin America made her realize that environmental and scientific concerns are linked to, and embedded within, complex socio-cultural, economic and political contexts.
Asher’s book Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands was recently published by Duke University Press in 2009. In it, she argues that Afro-Colombians are neither neglected victims of development, nor heroes of a cultural, “environmentally friendly” alternative to development. Eschewing the many binaries—tradition vs. modernity, progress vs. underdevelopment, exploitation vs. resistance, local vs. global, theory vs. practice—that plague and limit thinking about third world development and environmental movements, her book disrupts the notion that development is a hegemonic, homogenizing force of western rationality. Through an ethnographic and historical account of black organizing in the Pacific lowlands, she shows how struggles for positive social and environmental change are shaped differentially by and against local, national, and global influences.
Awards/Grants/Research Projects
Asher has been awarded a Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program (IAELP) award. The IAELP award enabled Asher to spend three months in India during Spring 2009 to engage in research on the paradoxical and power-laden connections between biodiversity conservation, economic development, and local communities in the third world.
With the IAELP award, Asher explored how specific on-the-ground conservation efforts engage rural women whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. This preliminary research will lay the groundwork for long-term, field-based research and action projects designed to involve local women from the onset and to address their concerns.
While now beginning work in India, Asher remains committed to Colombia (and Latin America in general). She is a regular at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association (http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/) and a research associate of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (http://www.umass.edu/clacls/). Through the latter, she is engaged in collaborative research to explore and compare how the “environment” and environmental issues open, and circumscribe, new spaces for the expression of social, cultural, and livelihood concerns of black and indigenous communities in Colombia and Chile. This collaborative work is conducted through a grant from the initiative on “Social Movements, Civic Participation, and Democratic Innovation: Interrogating the Civil Society Agenda” at UMASS. (http://www.umass.edu/civsoc/Welcome.html)
Asher’s new research project is a comparative study of the political economy of environmental conservation, and their raced and gendered dimensions. This project involves two elements: first, to reconceptualize and theorize human-nature relations by drawing on political-economic and feminist approaches in a postcolonial frame; second, to conduct archival research and ethnographic fieldwork of environmental conservation policies in Colombia, India, and other Latin American locations.
Selected Publications
2009. Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=24276&Bmain.item_option=1&Bmain.item=17249)
2009. (Co-authored with Diana Ojeda) “Producing Nature and Making the State: Ordenamiento Territorial in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia.” GeoForum 40 (3): 292-302. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.014)
2007. “Ser y Tener: Black Women’s Activism, Development and Ethnicity in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia.” Feminist Studies 33 (1): 11-37.
2004. “Texts in Context: Afro-Colombian Women’s Activism in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia.” Feminist Review vol. 78: 1-18
2004. “Engenderando desenvolvimento e ethnicidade nas terras baixas do Pacífico colombiano (Engendering Development and Ethnicity in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia).” Revista Estudos Feministas 12 (1): 15-45.
(http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-026X2004000100003&lng=en&nrm=iso)
2004. “Possibilities & Limits of Microfinance as a Development Strategy: A Conversation.” (With Veena Sampathkumar). Critical Half: (Annual Journal of Women for Women International) 2 (1): 8-13.
2000. “Mobilizing the Discourses of Sustainable Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia.” Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics. 13 (1): 111-125.
1996. “¿Etnicidad de Género o Género Etnico? (Ethnic gender or gendered ethnicity?).” Boletín de Antropología 10 (26): 9-26. Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín.
1993. (Co-authored with Erach Bharucha) “Behaviour Patterns of the Blackbuck Antilope cervicapra under Suboptimal Habitat Conditions.” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 90 (3): 371-393.
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