My research has been particularly focused on how spatial processes and relations of social movement practices are manifested across a variety of scales; how the particularities of specific places influence the character and emergence of various forms of conflict; how social movement practices are constitutive of different relationships to space; how social movement behaviours and practices are symbolically and materially mediated through discourses and images created by the social movements themselves and by the mass media; and the operational logics of social movement networks. My research here has taken two distinct paths. First, it has focused upon peasant movements resisting destructive neoliberal development in the Global South. My research has incorporated the political economy of development in South Asia (particularly, India, Nepal and Bangladesh); the role of multinational and transnational organisations in the development process; the economic, political, ecological and cultural effects of development upon societies at the national, regional and local levels; the popular response to this process in the form of social movements; the mediation of social movement agency by the specifics of place; and the identities created by those engaged in resistance practices.
My research has encompassed: (i) deforestation in the Himalayan foothills of Uttar Pradesh, India; (ii) development and displacement of communities in Orissa, India; (iii) tourism development in Goa, India; (iv) development of dams in the Narmada valley, Madhya Pradesh, India; (v) the practices of global justice networks as articulated by social movements in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Borneo; (vi) climate change and food sovereignty in Bangladesh and Nepal; (vii) climate justice practices and discourses (in UK, Europe, Asia, and South Africa).
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