September 01, 2009

IDCE Professor Kiran Asher releases new book

Kiran Asher, associate professor of International Development and Social Change, and Women's Studies published "Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands" (Duke University Press). The book provides a powerful framework for reconceptualizing the relationship between neoliberal development and social movements. Moving beyond the notion that development is a hegemonic, homogenizing force that victimizes local communities, Asher argues that development processes and social movements shape each other in uneven and paradoxical ways. For more on her book, visit http://tinyurl.com/mqw5qs

Earlier this year, Asher spent three months in India on a Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program award conducting research on the political economy of biodiversity conservation, and its raced and gendered dimensions.

Asher is also 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 work is conducted through a grant from the initiative on "Social Movements, Civic Participation, and Democratic Innovation: Interrogating the Civil Society Agenda" at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Asher joined the IDCE faculty in the fall of 2002.