Associate Professor of International Development and Social Change, and
Women’s Studies
My interdisciplinary
training is grounded in two decades of field-based research in Latin
America and South Asia. While my research interests are diverse they remain
focused on the gendered and raced dimensions of social and environmental change
in the global south. My approaches to these themes emerge from my analytical
engagement with postcolonialism, feminism, and marxism, and my political
commitment to social change. These commitments are also reflected in my
teaching, mentoring, and in what I read (http://www.redwolfconspiracy.com)
and write (http://kiranasher.blogspot.com).
Research and Publications
My research focuses
on the complex, contradictory and constitutive
connections between political economy, culture (including gender and race), and
nature.
In addition to regular conference papers (not listed here) and publications
(listed below), I have written a book (Black and Green: Afro-Colombians,
Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands, Duke University Press,
2009). In this monograph, I argue
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, my 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, I show how struggles for positive social and
environmental change are shaped differentially
by and against local, national and
global influences.
My 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, and India, (and
other Latin American locations).
While beginning work in India, I remain committed to Colombia (and Latin America
in general). I am 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, I am 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)
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.
[Engendering development and ethnicity in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Rev.
Estud. Fem. [online]. Jan./Apr. 2004, vol.12, no.1 [cited 01 December 2004],
p.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.
Co-author with Erach
Bharucha. 1993. Behaviour Patterns of the Blackbuck
Antilope
cervicapra under Suboptimal Habitat
Conditions. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 90 (3):
371-393.
Academic Training and Professional Trajectory
I took my Ph.D. in
Comparative Politics at the University of Florida (1998), and also obtained a
graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Prior to my doctoral work, I took a
Masters in Environmental Management at Duke University (1990). My undergraduate
training was in the Life Sciences at St Xavier’s College, Bombay (1987).
Before arriving at Clark
in 2002, I was a Rockefeller postdoctoral fellow (2001-2002) at the Institute
for Research on Women at Rutgers University, NJ (http://irw.rutgers.edu/).
I have also taught at Mount Holyoke College, MA (1997-1998) and Bates College,
ME (1998-2001). In spring 2006, during my pre-tenure sabbatical from Clark, I
returned to Mount Holyoke College as a research associate at the Five Colleges
Women’s Studies Research Center (http://www.fivecolleges.edu/sites/fcwsrc/index.php).
During my post tenure sabbatical, in spring 2009, I was in India on a Fulbright
(http://www.fulbrightonline.org/) Indo-American Environmental
Leadership Program fellowship.
I have carried out conservation-related fieldwork in India, China, the
USA, and various Latin American countries including Colombia, worked as a
biodiversity consultant for the World Bank (in 1991), and as a gender consultant
for several Colombian NGOs (in 1995). More recently (in 2005),
I served as outside “gender expert” to
help a CARE-USA team develop and evaluate the research protocols for their “Strategic
Impact Inquiry on Women’s Empowerment.” In summer 2008, I worked with the Julian
Cho Society (JCS), a Maya social movement in southern Belize to link gender
politics and indigenous land rights struggles.
Social Change
My commitment to social change is surely linked to having grown up in
post-independence India.
However, as a biologist trained in a postcolonial institution, for years I
refused to allow myself to be ‘distracted’ by social and political issues; I
kept my attention firmly focused on antelope and deer with the requisite
‘scientific distance.’
It was after year of
graduate training and fieldwork (see above) that I
came to understand that “theory” is central to my work, politics, and life. So
while I understand the impulse to “do good” through “development” and “solving
problems,” I find these impulses problematic at best and dangerous at worst.
That is, I find that most development interventions, including those promoted
through this department reinforce and replicate capitalist relations of power,
and gender, colonial modes of knowledge.
To me, social change
means engaging in the collective and political task of reconceptualizing new and
just ways of engaging each other and the non-human world. While implicit within
the notion of social change is the promise of something better for “humanity,”
the task is neither technical nor innocent. In modern history colonialism, third
world nationalisms, (post-World War II) developmentalism, Nazism, and socialism
are among the endeavors launched to bring about social change through the
application of science and reason. These endeavors have had checkered or
disastrous consequences and raise questions about how the promises of doing
good bear out in practice. Indeed, the civil rights, women’s rights,
indigenous rights, labor rights, and environmental movements (among others)
sought to redress the broken or unmet promises of prior attempts. Current
movements for social change, including anti-racist, anti-imperialist,
anti-sexist, feminist, developmental and environmental struggles bear the legacy
of past ones and require (a) understanding the functioning and implications of
existing arrangements of power and politics in specific contexts, and (b)
imagining and constituting alternative and just society-nature relations.
My work in IDCE is:
·
To keep questions about social change and power in my/our teaching, research,
and service agendas (I used to Coordinator the IDSC BA program and later the MA
program)
·
To disrupt the idea that social change can be brought about through “quick
fixes” to intractable problems. Put differently, development, environmental
(including GIS), and community work is NOT, and CANNOT, be merely technical or
practical. It is not free of or beyond social relations, history, and power.
·
To insist that working to “fix” developmental, environmental and community
issues requires engaging history, politics, and social theory. That this work is
linked to struggles for social change and requires hard work across time and
space and comes “without guarantees.”
·
To critically engage “difference” (disciplinary, socio-cultural,
politico-ideological, of race, gender and sexual orientation), build coalitions
and be in solidarity with colleagues, students, and allies beyond the
Department, University, and US academe
·
To recognize that there are different kinds of work linked to the above
(academic knowledge production, program and institution building, activism,
advocacy), and while they are interconnected they are not the same. Confusing
them or assuming that one can do them all simultaneously and effectively is a
fallacy I want to guard against.
Teaching Philosophy and Courses
Whether teaching development theories, gender studies, Latin American
politics, the parameters of “modernity,” or the political economy of
environmental conservation, I urge students to:
·
Eschew monocausal explanations of social and political phenomena (such as
underdevelopment, colonialism) and simplistic, apolitical solutions to them,
·
Move beyond the many binaries that plague thinking about third world development
(theory vs. practice; tradition vs. modernity; exploitation vs. resistance),
·
Think historically and analytically about the complex and contradictory nature
of social, economic and political processes, and the multiplicity of power
relations that underlie them, and
·
Be self-reflexive about their own learning and activism,
·
Discover the joys of reading and thinking critically.
What I teach at Clark
(see Academic Catalog for course descriptions):
·
ID 125: Tales
from the Far Side: Development and Underdevelopment in the Age of Globalization
·
ID/FYS 182: Are
We Modern Yet? (Regular class or First year seminar)
·
IDCE 360:
Development Theory
(aka Missionaries, Messiahs and Misfits: The History and Politics of
Development Theory)
Mentoring
I believe that
professional relationships among faculty, staff and students are imperative in
order to foster learning, critical inquiry and mutual respect in the US academy.
Many students first learn to become professionals in college and/or graduate
school. A professional relationship with your professors is a necessary, though
not sufficient, condition to finding faculty mentors. Be careful not to confuse
mentorship with friendship. Faculty are not your peers, and many consider it an
abuse of power relations to establish intimate social relations with students.
The guidelines below are meant to help you become and recognize academic
professionalism.
·
Emails as Professional Correspondences or Email
Etiquette
·
Guidelines for seeking Letters of Recommendation
·
How to Handle the Challenges and Fun of a Masters
·
Guidelines and Checklist for Written Work or
Professor Asher’s 20 Commandments!
·
Professor Asher’s Grading Criteria