Title/Position: Associate Professor
Department/Faculty/Institution: Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University
Email: gururani@yorku.ca
MCRI Projects: A2: Governance; A4: Infrastructure; B3: Land and Housing Markets; B4: Boundaries; B6: Water; B8: Everyday Suburbanisms; C4: South Asia Research Cluster; MCRI Steering Committee.
Background: As a social-cultural anthropologist, Shubhra Gururani is interested in feminist theory and methodology, critical political ecology, and cities and suburbs of the global south. For the last few years, she has been conducting ethnographic and archival research in Gurgaon, the Millennial City of India, which lies just outside of New Delhi, and is home to countless call-centers, corporate offices, gated enclaves, and ever expanding population of labor migrants. Her focus is primarily on issues of land acquisition and corporate development, disappearing urban villages, and the absence of sewage in Gurgaon. Gururani's forthcoming publication “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s Millennial City, Gurgaon,” through an examination of urban planning documents, describes how a place like Gurgaon came to be constituted in the post-independence India at the intersection of competing and contradictory goals of development and exemptions.
Research Interests: Critical Political Ecologies; Space and Place; Postcolonial Development; Histories of Science and Nature.
Select Publications:
Gururani, S. & Dasgupta, R. (2018). Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation beyond Cities in South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly. 53 (12): 41-45.
Gururani, S. (2017). Designed to Fail: Technopolitics of Disavowal and Disdain in an Urbanizing Frontier. Economic and Political Weekly. 52 (34).
Gururani, S. & *Kose, B. (2015). Shifting Terrains: Questions of Governance in India’s Cities and their Peripheries. In R. Keil & P. Hamel (eds.) Global Suburban Governance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (* indicates student participation).
Gururani, S. (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. (34) 1.
Berry, K. & Gururani, S. (2014). Special Section: Gender in the Himalaya. HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. 34 (1).
Gururani S. & Vandergeest P. (2014). Introduction: New Frontiers of Ecological Knowledge: Co-producing Knowledge and Governance in Asia. Conservation and Society. 12: 343-51.
Gururani, S. (2013). Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennial City.’ In A. Rademacher & K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.) Ecologies of Urbanism in India. Hong Kong University Press.
Gururani, S. (2013). On Capital’s Edge: Gurgaon, India’s Millennium City. In R. Keil (ed.) Suburban Constellations. Berlin: Jovis.
Gururani, S. (2011). Troubled Nature: Some Reflections on the Changing Nature of the Millennial City (Gurgaon), India. In I. Stefanovic & S. Scharper (eds.) The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gururani, S. (2002). Constructions of Third World Women’s Knowledge in the Development Discourse. International Social Science Journal. Special Issue on Indigenous Knowledges. (173).
Gururani, S. (2002). Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered Practices of Labor and Livelihood in the Forests of Kumaon Himalayas, India. Gender, Place, and Culture. 9 (3).
Gururani, S. (2000). Regimes of Control, Strategies of Access: Practices of Property and Community in Uttarakhand Himalayas, India. In A. Agrawal & K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.) Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
