Shubhra Gururani

Professor Gururani’s research explores the social histories and cultural politics of gender, nature, place, and science as they unfold in postcolonial settings like India. Interested in the cultural politics of power, knowledge, and difference, she draws from feminist and postcolonial theory, science and technology studies and political ecology to analyze the material and symbolic co-production of nature, race, gender, caste and ethnicity in India.

Through archival and extensive ethnographic research in the Himalayas, her research contests the ontological divide between nature and society and demonstrates how nature is not merely the ground for environmental conflicts or a ‘resource,’ as it is commonly assumed, but is constitutive of everyday practices of labour, livelihood, knowledge and subjectivity.

Her interest in the cultural politics of nature is not limited to the rural and extends to new urban spaces in India. She is conducting research on the urban political ecology of water and sewage in the Millennial city of India, Gurgaon and is currently part of a SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) on Global Suburbanisms, in which she is the Team Lead for South Asia as well as for Waste and Sewage Infrastructure.

Her papers have been published in Journal of Peasant Studies, International Journal of Social Sciences, Anthropologica and Gender, Place and Culture.