Kiran Asher

Kiran Asher is a biologist-turned-social scientist (B.SC Life Sciences, St Xavier’s College, Bombay, 1987; Masters, Environmental Management, Duke University, NC, 1990; Ph.D. Comparative Politics, University of Florida, 1998) whose current academic home is the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass. She teaches introductory and advances classes on transnational and postcolonial feminisms, marxisms and feminisms, and feminisms and environmental justice.

Her scholarship and teaching are grounded in over three-decades of field-based research in Asia (India and Indonesia) and Central and South America (Costa Rica, Belize, Brazil, and Colombia) on wildlife conservation, international development, and struggles for social change with particular attention to race and gender.  From 2013-2015 she worked for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia.

She has written about this seemingly unusual combination of the natural and social sciences, in the essays Thinking Fragments and Fieldwork. Her other publications include a monograph Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Duke University Press, 2009), and articles in Antipode, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Feminist Studies; Feminist Review; GeoForum; Hypatia, and elsewhere.

She is currently writing her second book entitled Fieldwork: Nature, Culture, and Gender in the Age of Climate Change, which foregrounds the complex and contradictory intertwining of nature and culture, and the challenges these pose for 21^st-century concerns about environmental and social justice. 

Kiran Asher has been the recipient of Fulbright-Nehru awards in 2009 and 2019 (extended to 2022), and is a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in India.  Through this and other support, she continues field-based research with Afro-Colombian movements in the Pacific lowlands and with pastoralist groups in the semi-arid grasslands of western India.  The goal of this work is to compares the “gendered” and “raced” dynamics of environmental conservation and sustainable development across the global south.  

Her professional service includes serving on the Editorial Collective of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (2018-2023) and as the co-editor of the Antipode Book Series.  She is also on the Editorial Advisory Board of the feminist journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.  As a member of the Five College community, you may see her at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, at the Abolition Justice (formerly Marxism and Postcolonialism) discussions and events, and in writing with her buddies in Third Space. 

Kiran’s professional hyperactivity is balanced out with playful activities with her poodle Runa and her fiction writer partner.