Kiran Asher
Biographic Data
| ID | 284278 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kiran Asher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kiran |
| FAMILY NAME | Asher |
| SIGNATURE | ASHER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3256-8077 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 386 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Querying Nature and (Anti‐/De‐)coloniality
The introduction to this Symposium outlines how actually existing movements contest various forms of “colonial Natures,” from settler property regimes to extractive frontiers and conservation landscapes. The authors of the six papers highlight the situated praxis of grassroots communities and organic intellectuals in Bolivia, India, Iran, Paraguay, Tanzania, and the United States, and show how they resist, reshape, and strategically engage coloni…
Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene
Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of “resilience” and of non‐humanist, non‐modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio‐ecological crises associated with “the Anthropocene”. This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indi…
Cyborgs Unbound
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) i…
Animal Sightings and Citings under Covid Capitalism
Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 599 Sushmita Chatterjee and Kiran Asher Animal Sightings and Citings under COVID Capitalism: Beyond Liberal Sentimentalism Conversations, news, and social media accounts about COVID are saturated with stories about animals: accounts of "wild" animals emerging and seen in cities around the world, an increase in the number of bird watchers, an astronomical rise in webcam views of wildlife…
Education for Sustainable Development Cannot Afford the Clichés and Pieties of Ivy League Policy Makers
The Brilliant, Monochromatic Red of Climate Leviathan
Climate Leviathan argues that to address the climate crisis we must extend the critique of capitalism and that to imagine a just world we need radically open democracy. This reviewer shares the book’s deep anticapitalist politics and Gramscian critique of climate science, but its lack of engagement with feminist, anticolonial, and other critical theories and philosophies of difference undermines its theoretical and political possibilities. Yet th…
Etnicidad de género o género étnico
Fragmented Forests, Fractured Lives
The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty‐five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro‐Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capita…
Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity
Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body poli…
When we cannot not compare. A commentary on Tariq Jazeel's ‘Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies’
Tariq Jazeel's remarks at the 2017 RGS/IBG annual conference and the paper in this issue are set against the backdrop of an ‘Anglophonic and allegorical’ library (Jazeel, this issue, p. 6). For those of us educated in former British colonies as for Mustafa Sa'eed—the protagonist of Tayeb Salih's novel—the English study is a familiar space. Though never having seen or been in any such study, in my mind's eye I settle myself comfortably in the armc…
The risky streets of ontologically redesigned cities
Reivindicar la cercanía entre los feminismos poscoloniales y decoloniales con base en Spivak y Rivera Cusicanqui
Tabula Rasa es una revista científica del área de las ciencias sociales con una periodicidad trimestral, dedicada principalmente a las disciplinas de la Antropología, Historia, Sociología, Trabajo Social, Geografía Humana y Estudios Culturales
After Post-Development
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post-development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it r…
Forests and Food Security
Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renewed attention to the importance of forests and their role in supplementing the food and nutrition needs of rural populations. With a concurrent uptake of "gender mainstreaming" for sustainable development, there is also a call for understanding the gendered dynamics of forest governance and food security. In this paper, we reviewed emerging research (2…
Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui on the Dilemmas of Representation in Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminisms
Gayatri Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writings are regularly and justifiably cited in reference to postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Both grapple with the thorny matter of representing subalternity and indigeneity, not only in Eurocentric scholarship, but also by migrant and diasporic academics and national elites. In this commentary, I foreground how Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui's persistent critiques of representation are imperative …
Beyond dichotomies
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a …
Gender Equality as an Entitlement
Concerns about gender equality and women’s empowerment are re-emerging as part of the post-2015 global development agenda,and addressing them is one of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).Every five years, the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women(known since 2010 as UN Women),publishes a ‘World Survey onthe Role of Women in Development’. These Surveys are presented to the Second Committee of the General Assembly and focus on s…
Gender and Green Governance
Latin American Decolonial Thought, or Making the Subaltern Speak
The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric "colonial modernity," the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated "outside" Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentia…
The footwork of critique
In this commentary Kiran Asher reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of the Karatini-Wainwright exchange in the context of development theory, including its postcolonial, postdevelopment, and feminist variants
A Discussion
Black and Green
Black and green
Capital, Interrupted
Producing nature and making the state
Producing nature and making the state
Black and Green
Latin American Decolonial Thought, or Making the Subaltern Speak
The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric "colonial modernity," the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated "outside" Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentia…
Beyond dichotomies
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a …
Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui on the Dilemmas of Representation in Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminisms
Gayatri Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writings are regularly and justifiably cited in reference to postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Both grapple with the thorny matter of representing subalternity and indigeneity, not only in Eurocentric scholarship, but also by migrant and diasporic academics and national elites. In this commentary, I foreground how Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui's persistent critiques of representation are imperative …
A Discussion
After Post-Development
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post-development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it r…
Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity
Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body poli…
Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene
Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of “resilience” and of non‐humanist, non‐modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio‐ecological crises associated with “the Anthropocene”. This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indi…
Fragmented Forests, Fractured Lives
The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty‐five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro‐Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capita…
Forests and Food Security
Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renewed attention to the importance of forests and their role in supplementing the food and nutrition needs of rural populations. With a concurrent uptake of "gender mainstreaming" for sustainable development, there is also a call for understanding the gendered dynamics of forest governance and food security. In this paper, we reviewed emerging research (2…
Engendrando desenvolvimento e etnicidade nas terras baixas do Pacífico colombiano
Neste ensaio, exploro como as organizações e redes de mulheres afro-colombianas moldam e são moldadas por iniciativas do Estado para desenvolver e modernizar a região do Pacífico. Argumento que, agindo assim, elas mobilizam e vão além da retórica desenvolvimentista do Estado e do discurso de uma etnia negra 'gendrada' e da tradição das organizações políticas negras da região
Texts in Context
This paper speaks across the divide between feminist theorists and praxis-oriented gender experts to argue for a more enabling reading of postcolonial feminist critiques of gender and development. Drawing on the activism of Afro-Colombian women in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia - most especially Matamba y Guasá, a network of black women's organizations from the state of Cauca - it brings attention to the independent ability of women in these lo…
Animal Sightings and Citings under Covid Capitalism
Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 599 Sushmita Chatterjee and Kiran Asher Animal Sightings and Citings under COVID Capitalism: Beyond Liberal Sentimentalism Conversations, news, and social media accounts about COVID are saturated with stories about animals: accounts of "wild" animals emerging and seen in cities around the world, an increase in the number of bird watchers, an astronomical rise in webcam views of wildlife…
The Brilliant, Monochromatic Red of Climate Leviathan
Climate Leviathan argues that to address the climate crisis we must extend the critique of capitalism and that to imagine a just world we need radically open democracy. This reviewer shares the book’s deep anticapitalist politics and Gramscian critique of climate science, but its lack of engagement with feminist, anticolonial, and other critical theories and philosophies of difference undermines its theoretical and political possibilities. Yet th…
Etnicidad de género o género étnico
The footwork of critique
In this commentary Kiran Asher reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of the Karatini-Wainwright exchange in the context of development theory, including its postcolonial, postdevelopment, and feminist variants
Deconstruction's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche
Sensitive to the fluidity of Nietzsche's thought, which often expresses itself in apparent contradiction, Karl Jaspers notes that “for nearly every single one of Nietzsche's judgements one can also find an opposite.” But Jaspers goes on to warn that the art of reading Nietzsche faithfully demands that we gradually locate the central axis of his philosophy so that seeming irreconcilables may be resolved into a hierarchy of importance. Not surprisi…
Deconstruction's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche
Sensitive to the fluidity of Nietzsche's thought, which often expresses itself in apparent contradiction, Karl Jaspers notes that “for nearly every single one of Nietzsche's judgements one can also find an opposite.” But Jaspers goes on to warn that the art of reading Nietzsche faithfully demands that we gradually locate the central axis of his philosophy so that seeming irreconcilables may be resolved into a hierarchy of importance. Not surprisi…
The Moral Blindness of Paul de Man
Paul de Man Wartime Journalism: 1939-1943 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 399 pp
Mobilizing the Discourses of Sustainable Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia
(2000). Mobilizing the Discourses of Sustainable Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia. Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 111-125
Texts in Context
This paper speaks across the divide between feminist theorists and praxis-oriented gender experts to argue for a more enabling reading of postcolonial feminist critiques of gender and development. Drawing on the activism of Afro-Colombian women in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia - most especially Matamba y Guasá, a network of black women's organizations from the state of Cauca - it brings attention to the independent ability of women in these lo…
Engendrando desenvolvimento e etnicidade nas terras baixas do Pacífico colombiano
Neste ensaio, exploro como as organizações e redes de mulheres afro-colombianas moldam e são moldadas por iniciativas do Estado para desenvolver e modernizar a região do Pacífico. Argumento que, agindo assim, elas mobilizam e vão além da retórica desenvolvimentista do Estado e do discurso de uma etnia negra 'gendrada' e da tradição das organizações políticas negras da região
Producing nature and making the state
Black and Green
Black and green
Capital, Interrupted
A Discussion
The footwork of critique
In this commentary Kiran Asher reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of the Karatini-Wainwright exchange in the context of development theory, including its postcolonial, postdevelopment, and feminist variants
Latin American Decolonial Thought, or Making the Subaltern Speak
The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric "colonial modernity," the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated "outside" Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentia…
Gender and Green Governance
Beyond dichotomies
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a …
Gender Equality as an Entitlement
Concerns about gender equality and women’s empowerment are re-emerging as part of the post-2015 global development agenda,and addressing them is one of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).Every five years, the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women(known since 2010 as UN Women),publishes a ‘World Survey onthe Role of Women in Development’. These Surveys are presented to the Second Committee of the General Assembly and focus on s…
Forests and Food Security
Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renewed attention to the importance of forests and their role in supplementing the food and nutrition needs of rural populations. With a concurrent uptake of "gender mainstreaming" for sustainable development, there is also a call for understanding the gendered dynamics of forest governance and food security. In this paper, we reviewed emerging research (2…
Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui on the Dilemmas of Representation in Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminisms
Gayatri Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writings are regularly and justifiably cited in reference to postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Both grapple with the thorny matter of representing subalternity and indigeneity, not only in Eurocentric scholarship, but also by migrant and diasporic academics and national elites. In this commentary, I foreground how Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui's persistent critiques of representation are imperative …
After Post-Development
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post-development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it r…
When we cannot not compare. A commentary on Tariq Jazeel's ‘Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies’
Tariq Jazeel's remarks at the 2017 RGS/IBG annual conference and the paper in this issue are set against the backdrop of an ‘Anglophonic and allegorical’ library (Jazeel, this issue, p. 6). For those of us educated in former British colonies as for Mustafa Sa'eed—the protagonist of Tayeb Salih's novel—the English study is a familiar space. Though never having seen or been in any such study, in my mind's eye I settle myself comfortably in the armc…
The risky streets of ontologically redesigned cities
Reivindicar la cercanía entre los feminismos poscoloniales y decoloniales con base en Spivak y Rivera Cusicanqui
Tabula Rasa es una revista científica del área de las ciencias sociales con una periodicidad trimestral, dedicada principalmente a las disciplinas de la Antropología, Historia, Sociología, Trabajo Social, Geografía Humana y Estudios Culturales
Education for Sustainable Development Cannot Afford the Clichés and Pieties of Ivy League Policy Makers
The Brilliant, Monochromatic Red of Climate Leviathan
Climate Leviathan argues that to address the climate crisis we must extend the critique of capitalism and that to imagine a just world we need radically open democracy. This reviewer shares the book’s deep anticapitalist politics and Gramscian critique of climate science, but its lack of engagement with feminist, anticolonial, and other critical theories and philosophies of difference undermines its theoretical and political possibilities. Yet th…
Etnicidad de género o género étnico
Fragmented Forests, Fractured Lives
The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty‐five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro‐Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capita…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (5 works)