Research team
Expertise
My expertise lies at the intersection of political ecology, development studies, Indigenous studies, socio-cultural anthropology and social movement research. I study how marginalised communities negotiate, resist and reshape the forms of power that organise land, ecology, identity and political life. Across my work, I ask who defines “development”, “conservation” and “sustainability”; whose knowledge counts; and how communities treated as peripheral become central to struggles over land, ecology and democratic futures. My doctoral research at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, examined Adivasi social movements in Jharkhand, eastern India. Based on ethnographic engagement with Indigenous communities, the research analysed how Adivasis mobilise to defend land, livelihoods, cultural worlds and political autonomy against displacement, extractive development and dominant social groups. Rather than treating Indigenous communities as passive victims, my work foregrounds their political agency, collective strategies and alternative understandings of human-nature relations. At IOB, University of Antwerp, I now coordinate work within FITNESS — Financing Transformative Nature-Based Solutions for Equitable and Just Sustainability Solutions — a Biodiversa+ project focused on Nature-based Solutions and Payments for Ecosystem Services. This expands my empirical engagement beyond India into comparative work with Brazil and South Africa. Through FITNESS, I examine how NbS and PES schemes are financed, legitimised and implemented, and whether they advance environmental justice or reproduce older forms of exclusion under greener vocabularies. Methodologically, my work is qualitative, ethnographic and collaborative. I draw on field-based research, interviews, movement histories, participatory approaches and critical policy analysis. Across research, teaching and public engagement, I bring together three strands of expertise: Indigenous social movements and Adivasi politics in India; political ecology of extraction, conservation, NbS, PES and environmental justice; and movement-oriented approaches to knowledge and methodology.