Seema Arora-Jonsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1521815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seema Arora-Jonsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seema |
| FAMILY NAME | Arora-Jonsson |
| SIGNATURE | ARORA-JONSSON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3841-0027 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 424 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Unraveling the production of ignorance in climate policymaking
Feminist decolonial scholars have called for disengaging from the current system built on a hierarchical logic of race and gender central to modern, colonial thinking. They have looked to worlds outside the modern system to lead us out of current unjust practices harming both humans and the environment. Although policymaking may be seen as the stronghold of the current political agenda and of the structures that have led to the climate crisis, we…
From crisis to sustainability
What does it mean to study places in ‘crisis’ and how does that affect the research done on the ‘rural’? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for ‘rural’ research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are be…
The sustainable development goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) have evoked optimism but have also been criticized for reproducing a universal template grounded in a western and neoliberal ideology. Identifying three strands of responses/critiques on the SDGs from a review of literature across several disciplines, I analyze what they have to say in the light of histories of past development work. I analyze how universalism is understood differently in different …
Multiple dimensions of sustainability
The term ‘sustainability’ has exploded in academic writing in recent years and rural studies is no exception. Conceptualising sustainability has meant needing to deal with the entanglements of the social, natural and economic in one frame. The Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030: Transforming our World have been seen as a stunning achievement for having succeeded in marrying goals around economic and/or social development with that of th…
The Well-being of International Migrants in Rural Areas
The conundrums of formal and informal meritocracy
Despite the academy’s commitment to the idea of meritocratic and fair principles in recruitments, promotions, student admissions and progress, gender segregation and gender inequalities continue to trouble universities worldwide. Through case-studies of two education programs at a Swedish university, we investigate how processes of formal merit, both formal (required for admission such as high grades) and what we identify as informal merit (needi…
Changing business as usual in global climate and development action
Carbon markets are being promoted both by business and governments as a predominant way to address climate change. Critical scholarship on climate change has brought attention to their disappointing climate performance, for the social and geopolitical inequalities they engender and for distracting from the imperative of changing current extractivist modes of capitalist production and consumption. Yet, given that private interests are considered c…
Territorial narratives
In the rural inland of northern Sweden, three mining projects are making the future of the land uncertain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these potential mining interventions create ‘open moments’, turbulent events that destabilizes established claims to land. We analyse how actors such as reindeer herders, indigenous groups, local and national government and mining companies make claims to land, (i.e territorialising it) by drawing…
Seeing the Quiet Politics in Unquiet Woods
We address two aspects of forest lives—violence and care—that are central to forest outcomes but often invisible in mainstream discussions on forests. We argue that questions of violence and care work in forests open up debates about what forests are, who defines them, and how. We draw primarily on feminist work on forestry, violence, and care to examine the gendered nature of forest conflicts and the ‘quiet politics’ of resistance to violence gr…
Lives in limbo
Two long-term trends characterized the response to the influx of asylum seekers in rural Sweden in 2015. First, current integration policies with an increasing focus on the individual migrant, especially in relation to education, employment and housing, provided the framework for the response. Second, the shift of rural governance from state control to collaborative arrangements with nonstate actors, enabled the unprecedented involvement of civil…
Bringing diversity to nature
Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underp…
What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards
Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely …
Blind spots in environmental policy-making
Policy Discourses and Marginal Places
Past decades have been marked with grassroots struggles around the use and access to natural resources such as forests, both in the global South and in the global North. On the one hand, we have politicians, bureaucrats and others needing to deal with these issues at the national and global level. On the other, we have the material practices and struggles at the local level as well as a parallel discourse on decentralization to local areas from t…
Disciplining Gender in Environmental Organizations
Gender experts are being recruited and gender routinized in the everyday work of international environmental organizations today. To what extent do these changes open up spaces for reorienting sustainability debates in terms of normative commitments to promoting gender equality and justice? We explore this question by studying how gender is done in one such organization meant to work towards sustainability. We examine how work with gender is orga…
Negotiating across difference
Shea butter, derived from the African shea tree, has acquired a pivotal position in global agro-food and cosmetics industries. In Burkina Faso, public and private actors as well as civil society are converging upon the product to boost the incomes of rural female producers. As a result of these trends, the shea value chain is increasingly segmented; shea nuts are sold in a low-return, conventional market and simultaneously enter an alternative, h…
Development and integration at a crossroads
The recent arrival of refugees in rural Sweden has raised hopes that they might stave off the depopulation of the country's periphery and lead to its development. Despite these visions in policy and in some academic literature, there is little research on how immigrant encounters with development and integration practices take shape on the ground. Critical research on immigrant integration in Sweden focuses on urban areas where most immigrants li…
Does resilience have a culture? Ecocultures and the politics of knowledge production
Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages
Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national prove…
The realm of freedom in new rural governance
Disharmoniska förbindelser. Diskurser om genus och gräsrotsaktivism i två skogssamhällen i Indien och Sverige
The importance of gender-equality and of women’s work in relation to the environment are considered to be crucial questions for development in ‘third world’ rural societies. ‘Development’ and a certain standard of welfare make these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country like Sweden. In this paper I trace some of the contradictions and connections in the ways in which gender equality is conceptualised in women’s struggles vis á vi…
Defining Solutions, Finding Problems
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is a policy instrument meant to mitigate climate change while also achieving poverty reduction in tropical countries. It has garnered critics for homogenising environmental and development governance and for ignoring how similar efforts have tended to exacerbate gender inequalities. Nonetheless, regarding such schemes as inevitable, some feminists argue for requirements that include wo…
Forty years of gender research and environmental policy
Gender, Development and Environmental Governance
A major challenge in studies of environmental governance is dealing with the diversity of the people involved at multiple levels – villagers, development agents, policy-makers, private resource users and others – and taking seriously their aspirations, conflicts and collaborations. This book examines this challenge in two very disparate parts of our world, exploring what gender-equality, resource management and development mean in real terms for …
Virtue and vulnerability
Virtue and vulnerability
Forty years of gender research and environmental policy
Discordant Connections
The importance of gender equality and of women's work in relation to the environment is regarded as a crucial question for development in "third-world" rural societies. "Development" and a certain standard of welfare make these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country such as Sweden. In this article, I trace some of the contradictions and connections in the ways in which gender equality is conceptualized in women's struggles vis-à-v…
The sustainable development goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) have evoked optimism but have also been criticized for reproducing a universal template grounded in a western and neoliberal ideology. Identifying three strands of responses/critiques on the SDGs from a review of literature across several disciplines, I analyze what they have to say in the light of histories of past development work. I analyze how universalism is understood differently in different …
The realm of freedom in new rural governance
Bringing diversity to nature
Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underp…
Lives in limbo
Two long-term trends characterized the response to the influx of asylum seekers in rural Sweden in 2015. First, current integration policies with an increasing focus on the individual migrant, especially in relation to education, employment and housing, provided the framework for the response. Second, the shift of rural governance from state control to collaborative arrangements with nonstate actors, enabled the unprecedented involvement of civil…
Disciplining Gender in Environmental Organizations
Gender experts are being recruited and gender routinized in the everyday work of international environmental organizations today. To what extent do these changes open up spaces for reorienting sustainability debates in terms of normative commitments to promoting gender equality and justice? We explore this question by studying how gender is done in one such organization meant to work towards sustainability. We examine how work with gender is orga…
Development and integration at a crossroads
The recent arrival of refugees in rural Sweden has raised hopes that they might stave off the depopulation of the country's periphery and lead to its development. Despite these visions in policy and in some academic literature, there is little research on how immigrant encounters with development and integration practices take shape on the ground. Critical research on immigrant integration in Sweden focuses on urban areas where most immigrants li…
Negotiating across difference
Shea butter, derived from the African shea tree, has acquired a pivotal position in global agro-food and cosmetics industries. In Burkina Faso, public and private actors as well as civil society are converging upon the product to boost the incomes of rural female producers. As a result of these trends, the shea value chain is increasingly segmented; shea nuts are sold in a low-return, conventional market and simultaneously enter an alternative, h…
Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages
Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national prove…
Unraveling the production of ignorance in climate policymaking
Feminist decolonial scholars have called for disengaging from the current system built on a hierarchical logic of race and gender central to modern, colonial thinking. They have looked to worlds outside the modern system to lead us out of current unjust practices harming both humans and the environment. Although policymaking may be seen as the stronghold of the current political agenda and of the structures that have led to the climate crisis, we…
From crisis to sustainability
What does it mean to study places in ‘crisis’ and how does that affect the research done on the ‘rural’? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for ‘rural’ research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are be…
Territorial narratives
In the rural inland of northern Sweden, three mining projects are making the future of the land uncertain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these potential mining interventions create ‘open moments’, turbulent events that destabilizes established claims to land. We analyse how actors such as reindeer herders, indigenous groups, local and national government and mining companies make claims to land, (i.e territorialising it) by drawing…
What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards
Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely …
Changing business as usual in global climate and development action
Carbon markets are being promoted both by business and governments as a predominant way to address climate change. Critical scholarship on climate change has brought attention to their disappointing climate performance, for the social and geopolitical inequalities they engender and for distracting from the imperative of changing current extractivist modes of capitalist production and consumption. Yet, given that private interests are considered c…
Relational dynamics and strategies
Multiple dimensions of sustainability
The term ‘sustainability’ has exploded in academic writing in recent years and rural studies is no exception. Conceptualising sustainability has meant needing to deal with the entanglements of the social, natural and economic in one frame. The Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030: Transforming our World have been seen as a stunning achievement for having succeeded in marrying goals around economic and/or social development with that of th…
Blind spots in environmental policy-making
Relational dynamics and strategies
Feminisms in Development
Bortom den rätta frågan. Metodologiska innebörder av att forska tillsammans
In the academy, a clearly defined question is the sine qua non of a good study. Theoretical, rather than practitioner knowledge, is valued. Theories considered to be neutral often have a male bias. Knowing all this, how does one link theoretical and conceptual categories with real change for women and men working with local development/forests and formulate a reasearch question useful not only to scientists but also to community members? I began …
Discordant Connections
The importance of gender equality and of women's work in relation to the environment is regarded as a crucial question for development in "third-world" rural societies. "Development" and a certain standard of welfare make these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country such as Sweden. In this article, I trace some of the contradictions and connections in the ways in which gender equality is conceptualized in women's struggles vis-à-v…
Virtue and vulnerability
Gender, Development and Environmental Governance
A major challenge in studies of environmental governance is dealing with the diversity of the people involved at multiple levels – villagers, development agents, policy-makers, private resource users and others – and taking seriously their aspirations, conflicts and collaborations. This book examines this challenge in two very disparate parts of our world, exploring what gender-equality, resource management and development mean in real terms for …
Forty years of gender research and environmental policy
Defining Solutions, Finding Problems
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is a policy instrument meant to mitigate climate change while also achieving poverty reduction in tropical countries. It has garnered critics for homogenising environmental and development governance and for ignoring how similar efforts have tended to exacerbate gender inequalities. Nonetheless, regarding such schemes as inevitable, some feminists argue for requirements that include wo…
Does resilience have a culture? Ecocultures and the politics of knowledge production
Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages
Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national prove…
The realm of freedom in new rural governance
Disharmoniska förbindelser. Diskurser om genus och gräsrotsaktivism i två skogssamhällen i Indien och Sverige
The importance of gender-equality and of women’s work in relation to the environment are considered to be crucial questions for development in ‘third world’ rural societies. ‘Development’ and a certain standard of welfare make these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country like Sweden. In this paper I trace some of the contradictions and connections in the ways in which gender equality is conceptualised in women’s struggles vis á vi…
Blind spots in environmental policy-making
Policy Discourses and Marginal Places
Past decades have been marked with grassroots struggles around the use and access to natural resources such as forests, both in the global South and in the global North. On the one hand, we have politicians, bureaucrats and others needing to deal with these issues at the national and global level. On the other, we have the material practices and struggles at the local level as well as a parallel discourse on decentralization to local areas from t…
Disciplining Gender in Environmental Organizations
Gender experts are being recruited and gender routinized in the everyday work of international environmental organizations today. To what extent do these changes open up spaces for reorienting sustainability debates in terms of normative commitments to promoting gender equality and justice? We explore this question by studying how gender is done in one such organization meant to work towards sustainability. We examine how work with gender is orga…
Negotiating across difference
Shea butter, derived from the African shea tree, has acquired a pivotal position in global agro-food and cosmetics industries. In Burkina Faso, public and private actors as well as civil society are converging upon the product to boost the incomes of rural female producers. As a result of these trends, the shea value chain is increasingly segmented; shea nuts are sold in a low-return, conventional market and simultaneously enter an alternative, h…
Development and integration at a crossroads
The recent arrival of refugees in rural Sweden has raised hopes that they might stave off the depopulation of the country's periphery and lead to its development. Despite these visions in policy and in some academic literature, there is little research on how immigrant encounters with development and integration practices take shape on the ground. Critical research on immigrant integration in Sweden focuses on urban areas where most immigrants li…
What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards
Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely …
Bringing diversity to nature
Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underp…
Seeing the Quiet Politics in Unquiet Woods
We address two aspects of forest lives—violence and care—that are central to forest outcomes but often invisible in mainstream discussions on forests. We argue that questions of violence and care work in forests open up debates about what forests are, who defines them, and how. We draw primarily on feminist work on forestry, violence, and care to examine the gendered nature of forest conflicts and the ‘quiet politics’ of resistance to violence gr…
Lives in limbo
Two long-term trends characterized the response to the influx of asylum seekers in rural Sweden in 2015. First, current integration policies with an increasing focus on the individual migrant, especially in relation to education, employment and housing, provided the framework for the response. Second, the shift of rural governance from state control to collaborative arrangements with nonstate actors, enabled the unprecedented involvement of civil…
The Well-being of International Migrants in Rural Areas
The conundrums of formal and informal meritocracy
Despite the academy’s commitment to the idea of meritocratic and fair principles in recruitments, promotions, student admissions and progress, gender segregation and gender inequalities continue to trouble universities worldwide. Through case-studies of two education programs at a Swedish university, we investigate how processes of formal merit, both formal (required for admission such as high grades) and what we identify as informal merit (needi…
Changing business as usual in global climate and development action
Carbon markets are being promoted both by business and governments as a predominant way to address climate change. Critical scholarship on climate change has brought attention to their disappointing climate performance, for the social and geopolitical inequalities they engender and for distracting from the imperative of changing current extractivist modes of capitalist production and consumption. Yet, given that private interests are considered c…
Territorial narratives
In the rural inland of northern Sweden, three mining projects are making the future of the land uncertain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these potential mining interventions create ‘open moments’, turbulent events that destabilizes established claims to land. We analyse how actors such as reindeer herders, indigenous groups, local and national government and mining companies make claims to land, (i.e territorialising it) by drawing…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Corporate governance (9 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Geography (8 works)