I am the Director of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. I have formerly served as the Chair and Undergraduate Program Director of the Department of Anthropology, the Associate Director of the York Center for Asian Research, the Interim Director of the CITY Institute, and the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program. My areas of research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical political ecologies, space and place, urban transformation, agrarian change, and histories of science and nature. I have conducted extensive ethnographic and archival fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas. I examined how long and complex histories of scientific forestry and colonialism produced the highly gendered and racialized landscape of property, labour, access, and knowledge. In my current research projects, I turn my attention to the rapid process of urbanization and explore how agrarian-rural hinterlands are turned into urban enclaves and cities. Through an ethnographic lens, I focus on the politics of land, property-making, caste politics, planning, and agrarian-urban interface. I have recently launched a new research project that critically examines the discourse and practice of urban ecological restoration and rewilding.

Research Interests

Approach to Teaching

At the graduate level, I teach Anthropology 5190/ Sociology 6315/ Geography 5325 ANTH Cultural Politics of the Environment and Development. The central question that guides this graduate seminar is: what constitutes environmental politics, locally and globally? Closely related to this are the questions: what constitutes nature/s, how is such a profoundly unstable entity called nature produced and reproduced in everyday life, what are the symbolic and material contestations that underlie the politics of nature and (re)make nature, how are meanings assigned, and nature remembered, in diverse yet historically and geographically specific ways. In the last decade, there has been a vast body of writings on the politics of nature, broadly conceived, and encompasses a range of theoretical perspectives. While ‘political ecology’ has emerged as the new eclectic constellation of theoretical approaches, it too has its limitations and is embroiled in some of the fundamental essentialisms that inform the debates on natures. In this course, in order to move away from an understanding of ‘natures’ as a mere social, political, and economic backdrop, we will draw on recent debates in cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and science studies and adopt a cultural politics perspective that explores how hybrids of nature and culture variously called ‘socionatures’ or ‘cybernatures’ are discursively constituted. Given that there are competing interpretations and often very high and multiple stakes in understanding/representing environmental loss, claims, and knowledges, the questions of identity, territory, and meanings have increasingly become central to the cultural politics of environment and development. Attentive to the historical, political economic, and cultural discourses and practices that constitute these environmental contestations, the emphasis in the course will be to look at the struggles over nature as struggles over place, identity, meanings, representations, and livelihoods. At the undergraduate level, I will teach ANTH 4440 3.0 The Anthropology of the City.

Upcoming Courses

I am the Director of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. I have formerly served as the Chair and Undergraduate Program Director of the Department of Anthropology, the Associate Director of the York Center for Asian Research, the Interim Director of the CITY Institute, and the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program. My areas of research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical political ecologies, space and place, urban transformation, agrarian change, and histories of science and nature. I have conducted extensive ethnographic and archival fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas. I examined how long and complex histories of scientific forestry and colonialism produced the highly gendered and racialized landscape of property, labour, access, and knowledge. In my current research projects, I turn my attention to the rapid process of urbanization and explore how agrarian-rural hinterlands are turned into urban enclaves and cities. Through an ethnographic lens, I focus on the politics of land, property-making, caste politics, planning, and agrarian-urban interface. I have recently launched a new research project that critically examines the discourse and practice of urban ecological restoration and rewilding.

My current project traces the unfolding processes and politics of rapid urban transformation. I focus on urban peripheries and examine how agrarian spaces and livelihoods are recruited to make spectacular cities. Taking Gurgaon as a case study—once a cluster of villages and now India’s Millennial City with its shopping malls, gleaming office towers, luxury apartments, IT complexes, and ever-expanding construction sites—I explore the social relations of land, class, caste, and property that underpin this transformation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with urban planners, architects, developers, real estate brokers, local landowners, and village residents, I document how urban spaces are reconstituted in complex and unexpected ways, how agricultural farms and pastoral fields are turned into urban real estate and, in turn, how they coproduce the urban fabric.

My new SSHRC-funded project, Life and Death of Urban Natures, moves beyond the conventional separation of "society" and "nature" to explore their entanglements in producing social-natures. I investigate how land, water, rocks, and other non-human agents become integral to urbanization and the burgeoning property market. Through an analysis of discourses and practices that mobilize nature to propel urbanization, I explore how new meanings and values are cultivated through and with nature? How is nature turned into private property? How competing ideas of nature perform the political and ideological work of shaping new social relations of civility, propriety, and modernity in the Global South?

Building on this, I have recently initiated a collaborative research project with a conservation biologist, Restoring Urban Ecologies, which critically examines the discourse and practices of ecological restoration, rewilding, and biodiversity in urbanizing landscapes. We investigate how these ideas unfold amid rising property speculation, bourgeois environmentalism, shifting caste politics, and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism.
My publications have appeared in Gender, Place, and Culture; Journal of Peasant Studies, City, Urban Studies, SAMAJ, Urbanisation, Anthropologica, Economic and Political Weekly, and several edited volumes. For a full list, please visit https://yorku.academia.edu/ShubhraGururani

Degrees

Appointments

Professional Leadership

I am currently the Director of York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). I was the former Chair and Undergraduate Program Director of the Department of Anthropology. I have served as the Associate Director of York Center for Asian Research, Interim Director of the CITY Institute, Co-chair of the Race Equity Caucus, and the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program.

Research Interests

Approach to Teaching

At the graduate level, I teach Anthropology 5190/ Sociology 6315/ Geography 5325 ANTH Cultural Politics of the Environment and Development. The central question that guides this graduate seminar is: what constitutes environmental politics, locally and globally? Closely related to this are the questions: what constitutes nature/s, how is such a profoundly unstable entity called nature produced and reproduced in everyday life, what are the symbolic and material contestations that underlie the politics of nature and (re)make nature, how are meanings assigned, and nature remembered, in diverse yet historically and geographically specific ways. In the last decade, there has been a vast body of writings on the politics of nature, broadly conceived, and encompasses a range of theoretical perspectives. While ‘political ecology’ has emerged as the new eclectic constellation of theoretical approaches, it too has its limitations and is embroiled in some of the fundamental essentialisms that inform the debates on natures. In this course, in order to move away from an understanding of ‘natures’ as a mere social, political, and economic backdrop, we will draw on recent debates in cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and science studies and adopt a cultural politics perspective that explores how hybrids of nature and culture variously called ‘socionatures’ or ‘cybernatures’ are discursively constituted. Given that there are competing interpretations and often very high and multiple stakes in understanding/representing environmental loss, claims, and knowledges, the questions of identity, territory, and meanings have increasingly become central to the cultural politics of environment and development. Attentive to the historical, political economic, and cultural discourses and practices that constitute these environmental contestations, the emphasis in the course will be to look at the struggles over nature as struggles over place, identity, meanings, representations, and livelihoods. At the undergraduate level, I will teach ANTH 4440 3.0 The Anthropology of the City.

Upcoming Courses