Shubhra Gururani

Associate Professor
Director, York Centre for Asian Research
Faculty Associate, Faculty of Urban and Environmental Change
Office: 836 Kaneff Tower
Phone: (416) 736-2100
Email: gururani@yorku.ca
Primary website: Prof. Shubhra Gururani
Secondary website: Department of Anthropology
Media Requests Welcome
Accepting New Graduate Students
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
PhD, Anthropology, Syracuse UniversityMPhil, , Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi
MSc, , University of Delhi
BSc (Hons) , University of Delhi
Appointments
Faculty of Graduate StudiesProfessional 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
2021 Special Issue. Agrarian Urbanisation: Emerging Entanglements of Land, Labour and Capital. Urbanisation. Volume 6:1. Co-edited with Sai Balakrishnan.
2021 Special Issue. Engaging the Urban from the Periphery. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal. SAMAJ. Volume 26. Co-edited with Loraine Kennedy and Ashima Sood.
2018 Special Issue. Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation Beyond Cities in South Asia. Co-edited with Rajarshi Dasgupta. Review of Urban Affairs. Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 53. Issue No. 12. March 24.
2015 Special Issue. Ethnographies of the Political: Honouring Malcolm
Blincow. Anthropologica. Volume 57: 1. Co-edited with Karl Schmid
2015 Gender in the Himalaya: Feminist Explorations of Identity, Place, and Positionality. Himal Books. Co-edited with Kim Berry.
Situating Suburban Ecologies in the Global South: Notes from
India’s Urban periphery.” Eds. Maria Kaika, RogeTait Mandler, Yannis Tzaninis. Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester. Manchester University Press
Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier
https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/10.1080/13604813.2024.2322785
2021 “New Terrain of Agrarian Urban Studies: Limits and Possibilities” Urbanisation. Volume 6:1 Co-author Sai Balakrishnan.
2021 “Land as an Intermittent Commodity: Ethnographic Insights from India's Urban-
agrarian Frontiers.” Co-author Sarasij Majumder. Urbanisation. Volume 6:1
2021 “Situating Suburban Ecologies in the Global South:
Notes from India’s periphery.” Eds. Maria Kaika, RogeTait Mandler, Yannis Tzaninis. Moving UPE beyond the city: towards an integrated political ecology of suburbanization (forthcoming)
2021 “The Co-production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban
Peripheries.” In South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) Co-author Loraine Kennedy.
2022 (forthcoming) “Co-existing Heterogeneity": Urban Frontiers in the Global South.”
Eds. Jennifer Robinson and Patrick LeGales. Routledge Handbook of Comparative Urban Studies.
2019 “Cities in a world of villages: Agrarian Urbanism and the making of India’s
urbanizing frontiers,” Urban Geography.
2018 “Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation Beyond Cities in South Asia.” (with
Rajarshi Dasgupta) in Review of Urban Affairs. Economic and Political Weekly.
Volume 53. No. 12
2019 ““Designed to Fail”: Technopolitics of Sewage in India’s Urban Periphery.” In Critical Perspectives on Suburban Infrastructures: Contemporary International Cases.Edited by Pierre Filion and Nina M. Pulver.Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2018 “When Land Becomes Gold: Political Ecology of the Commons in an
urbanizing frontier.” In Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice: Rethinking parks and people. Co-Editors: Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe. Pages 107 -125. Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group.
2017 “Designed to Fail”: Technopolitics of Disavowal and Disdain in an Urbanizing
Frontier.” Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 52. August 30.
2015 “Introduction.” Ethnographies of the Political: Honouring Malcolm Blincow. Special Issue of Anthropologica. Volume 57: 1. Co-edited with Karl Schmid
2014 “Cultural Politics of Gendered Identity, Place and Positionality.” Special Section. Himalaya, The Journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Vol. 34: No. 1 (with Kim Berry)
2014 "Geographies that Make Resistance”: Remapping the Politics of Gender and Place in Uttarakhand, India," Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 34: No. 1, Article 12.
2014 “Introduction: New Frontiers of Ecological Knowledge: Co-producing Knowledge and Governance in Asia” Special Issue in Conservation and Society. (with Peter Vandergeest)
2014 “Shifting Terrains: Questions of Governance in India’s Cities and their Peripheries.” In Suburban Governance. Co-editors, Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil. University of Toronto Press. Toronto. (with Burak Kose)
2013 “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennial City.’” In Ecologies of Urbanism in India. Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan Eds. Hong Kong University Press
2013 “On Capital’s Edge: Gurgaon, India’s Millennial City.” In Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land, Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Ed. Roger Keil. Jovis.
2012 “Troubled Nature”: Some Reflections on the Changing Nature of the
Millennial City (Gurgaon), India. In The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment. Ingrid Stefanovic and Stephen Scharper (Eds.) University of Toronto Press. Toronto.
2002 “2002 “Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered Practices of Labor and Livelihood in the Forests of Kumaon Himalayas, India.” Gender, Place, and Culture. Volume 9, No.3.” Gender, Place, and Culture. Volume 9, No.3.
2002 “Constructions of Third World Women’s Knowledge in the Development Discourse.” International Social Science Journal. Special Issue on Indigenous Knowledges. No. 173. September.
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
Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
Fall 2025 | GS/ANTH5060 3.0 | A | Theory in Social Anthropology | SEMR |
Winter 2026 | GS/GEOG5326 3.0 | M | Critical Political Ecologies | SEMR |
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
PhD, Anthropology, Syracuse UniversityMPhil, , Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi
MSc, , University of Delhi
BSc (Hons) , University of Delhi
Appointments
Faculty of Graduate StudiesProfessional 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
All Publications
Situating Suburban Ecologies in the Global South: Notes from
India’s Urban periphery.” Eds. Maria Kaika, RogeTait Mandler, Yannis Tzaninis. Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester. Manchester University Press
2021 Special Issue. Agrarian Urbanisation: Emerging Entanglements of Land, Labour and Capital. Urbanisation. Volume 6:1. Co-edited with Sai Balakrishnan.
2021 Special Issue. Engaging the Urban from the Periphery. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal. SAMAJ. Volume 26. Co-edited with Loraine Kennedy and Ashima Sood.
2018 Special Issue. Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation Beyond Cities in South Asia. Co-edited with Rajarshi Dasgupta. Review of Urban Affairs. Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 53. Issue No. 12. March 24.
2015 Special Issue. Ethnographies of the Political: Honouring Malcolm
Blincow. Anthropologica. Volume 57: 1. Co-edited with Karl Schmid
2015 Gender in the Himalaya: Feminist Explorations of Identity, Place, and Positionality. Himal Books. Co-edited with Kim Berry.
Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier
https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/10.1080/13604813.2024.2322785
2021 “New Terrain of Agrarian Urban Studies: Limits and Possibilities” Urbanisation. Volume 6:1 Co-author Sai Balakrishnan.
2021 “Land as an Intermittent Commodity: Ethnographic Insights from India's Urban-
agrarian Frontiers.” Co-author Sarasij Majumder. Urbanisation. Volume 6:1
2021 “Situating Suburban Ecologies in the Global South:
Notes from India’s periphery.” Eds. Maria Kaika, RogeTait Mandler, Yannis Tzaninis. Moving UPE beyond the city: towards an integrated political ecology of suburbanization (forthcoming)
2021 “The Co-production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban
Peripheries.” In South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) Co-author Loraine Kennedy.
2022 (forthcoming) “Co-existing Heterogeneity": Urban Frontiers in the Global South.”
Eds. Jennifer Robinson and Patrick LeGales. Routledge Handbook of Comparative Urban Studies.
2019 “Cities in a world of villages: Agrarian Urbanism and the making of India’s
urbanizing frontiers,” Urban Geography.
2018 “Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation Beyond Cities in South Asia.” (with
Rajarshi Dasgupta) in Review of Urban Affairs. Economic and Political Weekly.
Volume 53. No. 12
2019 ““Designed to Fail”: Technopolitics of Sewage in India’s Urban Periphery.” In Critical Perspectives on Suburban Infrastructures: Contemporary International Cases.Edited by Pierre Filion and Nina M. Pulver.Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2018 “When Land Becomes Gold: Political Ecology of the Commons in an
urbanizing frontier.” In Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice: Rethinking parks and people. Co-Editors: Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe. Pages 107 -125. Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group.
2017 “Designed to Fail”: Technopolitics of Disavowal and Disdain in an Urbanizing
Frontier.” Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 52. August 30.
2015 “Introduction.” Ethnographies of the Political: Honouring Malcolm Blincow. Special Issue of Anthropologica. Volume 57: 1. Co-edited with Karl Schmid
2014 “Cultural Politics of Gendered Identity, Place and Positionality.” Special Section. Himalaya, The Journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Vol. 34: No. 1 (with Kim Berry)
2014 "Geographies that Make Resistance”: Remapping the Politics of Gender and Place in Uttarakhand, India," Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 34: No. 1, Article 12.
2014 “Introduction: New Frontiers of Ecological Knowledge: Co-producing Knowledge and Governance in Asia” Special Issue in Conservation and Society. (with Peter Vandergeest)
2014 “Shifting Terrains: Questions of Governance in India’s Cities and their Peripheries.” In Suburban Governance. Co-editors, Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil. University of Toronto Press. Toronto. (with Burak Kose)
2013 “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennial City.’” In Ecologies of Urbanism in India. Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan Eds. Hong Kong University Press
2013 “On Capital’s Edge: Gurgaon, India’s Millennial City.” In Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land, Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Ed. Roger Keil. Jovis.
2012 “Troubled Nature”: Some Reflections on the Changing Nature of the
Millennial City (Gurgaon), India. In The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment. Ingrid Stefanovic and Stephen Scharper (Eds.) University of Toronto Press. Toronto.
2002 “2002 “Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered Practices of Labor and Livelihood in the Forests of Kumaon Himalayas, India.” Gender, Place, and Culture. Volume 9, No.3.” Gender, Place, and Culture. Volume 9, No.3.
2002 “Constructions of Third World Women’s Knowledge in the Development Discourse.” International Social Science Journal. Special Issue on Indigenous Knowledges. No. 173. September.
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
Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
Fall 2025 | GS/ANTH5060 3.0 | A | Theory in Social Anthropology | SEMR |
Winter 2026 | GS/GEOG5326 3.0 | M | Critical Political Ecologies | SEMR |