Carly E Nichols
Biographic Data
| ID | 86510 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carly E Nichols |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carly E |
| FAMILY NAME | Nichols |
| SIGNATURE | NICHOLS C E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2124-9126 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Natural farming for whom? Environmental justice and state-led chemical-free farming promotion in India
India's government has recently begun promoting ‘agroecological' agriculture through the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). While NMNF is framed as a strategy to improve farmer incomes, health and nutrition, and environmental sustainability, little research has examined its justice implications. Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic research from two districts in eastern Madhya Pradesh, this paper analyzes NMNF through an environmental…
Unpacking women farmers
The gendered dimensions of an ‘herbicide revolution’
Herbicide adoption transforms women’s labor and rural gender relations. • A feminist lens reveals trade-offs in “labor-saving” agricultural change. • Herbicide use can erode women’s social spaces and ecological expertise. • “Drudgery” is context-specific and can devalue women’s unpaid labor. • Labor-saving tools like herbicide may not reduce women’s total workload. Across much of the world weeding has primarily been a form of feminized agricultur…
The Capital–Labour–State Dynamics of Herbicide Adoption in Rainfed India
This paper engages debates around the capital–labour–state dynamics of agrarian transitions to address the oft‐studied but still little‐understood question of why farmers adopt herbicides when they do. Over the last several years, smallholder farmers in India have begun using the herbicide bispyribac sodium at breakneck speeds, particularly in semi‐subsistence, marginalized tracts such as the eastern districts of Madhya Pradesh (MP), India. First…
Stressor Source as a New Dimension of Emotional Political Ecologies
Introduction to the special issue on bodies, health, environments
Centering the body in agricultural development
Frustrated farmers and the fee simple
The Women Farmer Stress Inventory
PURPOSE: While women identifying as primary farmers have increased in the United States, there has not been research focused on the antecedents of stress and quality of life among women farmers in particular. This study set out to construct a Women Farmer Stress Inventory (WFSI), test its dimensionality, and assess its criterion-related validity by looking at its relationship with subjective wellbeing as measured by the Satisfaction with Life Sca…
Being a woman with the “skills of a man”
There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly l…
Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India
Women's self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition interve…
It doesn't bother me
Equity and empowerment effects
Community health workers (CHW) are individuals with no formal health training who perform various roles to address health disparities. There are long-sustained debates over how different forms of incentives shape CHW programs, which are often staffed with volunteer or minimally remunerated women. These debates are complicated by the diversity of CHW roles and contexts in which they work. Evidence is particularly scant around "change-agent" style …
Inflammatory agriculture
Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that ma…
The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's Covid-19 response
India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as 'COVID warriors' engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically …
Digesting agriculture development
Forging just dietary futures
Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight, obesity and chronic disease are simultaneously on the rise. Moreover, while volumes of robust research on causes and solutions to malnutrition have been published, and calls for interdisciplinarity are on the rise, researchers taking different epistemological and methodological choices have largely remained disciplinari…
Self-help groups as platforms for development
Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However, there is currently little understanding as to whether SHGs are effective or equitable platforms for delivering health or livelihoods interventions. Social capital is hypothesized as a comparative advantage when utilizing SHGs as development platforms, however the specific mechan…
The politics of mobility and empowerment
Within the empowerment literature, “freedom of movement” or “mobility” are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded …
Spaces for women
Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sectoral roots through re-diversifying agricultural production while integrating women's empowerment and nutrition behavior-change communication components. For these integrated nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, women-led self-help groups have emerged as promising platforms for program delivery. Yet, while well-designed nutrition behavior-change com…
Towards an integrated political ecology of health and bodies
Political ecology of health (PEH) has become a robust subfield in geography. PEH scholarship deploys diverse theories and methods across analytical realms of political economy, social discourse, and materiality. Yet, within PEH the materiality of the body has been theoretically divided between an affective, visceral approach and one that views the body as a socio-ecological assemblage. We contend these two approaches are not mutually exclusive an…
Nutrition sensitive agriculture
The wazan janch
The Gendered Impacts of Covid-19 amid Agrarian Distress
COVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes surprising ways. We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial st…
Geographic contingency, affective facts, and the politics of global nutrition policy
Towards an integrated political ecology of health and bodies
Political ecology of health (PEH) has become a robust subfield in geography. PEH scholarship deploys diverse theories and methods across analytical realms of political economy, social discourse, and materiality. Yet, within PEH the materiality of the body has been theoretically divided between an affective, visceral approach and one that views the body as a socio-ecological assemblage. We contend these two approaches are not mutually exclusive an…
Self-help groups as platforms for development
Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However, there is currently little understanding as to whether SHGs are effective or equitable platforms for delivering health or livelihoods interventions. Social capital is hypothesized as a comparative advantage when utilizing SHGs as development platforms, however the specific mechan…
Shifting production/shifting consumption
The Gendered Impacts of Covid-19 amid Agrarian Distress
COVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes surprising ways. We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial st…
It doesn't bother me
The politics of mobility and empowerment
Within the empowerment literature, “freedom of movement” or “mobility” are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded …
Spaces for women
Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sectoral roots through re-diversifying agricultural production while integrating women's empowerment and nutrition behavior-change communication components. For these integrated nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, women-led self-help groups have emerged as promising platforms for program delivery. Yet, while well-designed nutrition behavior-change com…
Nutrition sensitive agriculture
Millets, milk and maggi
Time Ni Hota Hai
This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labo…
Digesting agriculture development
Centering the body in agricultural development
Being a woman with the “skills of a man”
There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly l…
Inflammatory agriculture
Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that ma…
Forging just dietary futures
Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight, obesity and chronic disease are simultaneously on the rise. Moreover, while volumes of robust research on causes and solutions to malnutrition have been published, and calls for interdisciplinarity are on the rise, researchers taking different epistemological and methodological choices have largely remained disciplinari…
The wazan janch
Geographic contingency, affective facts, and the politics of global nutrition policy
Frustrated farmers and the fee simple
Equity and empowerment effects
Community health workers (CHW) are individuals with no formal health training who perform various roles to address health disparities. There are long-sustained debates over how different forms of incentives shape CHW programs, which are often staffed with volunteer or minimally remunerated women. These debates are complicated by the diversity of CHW roles and contexts in which they work. Evidence is particularly scant around "change-agent" style …
Shifting production/shifting consumption
Time Ni Hota Hai
This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labo…
Millets, milk and maggi
Geographic contingency, affective facts, and the politics of global nutrition policy
Towards an integrated political ecology of health and bodies
Political ecology of health (PEH) has become a robust subfield in geography. PEH scholarship deploys diverse theories and methods across analytical realms of political economy, social discourse, and materiality. Yet, within PEH the materiality of the body has been theoretically divided between an affective, visceral approach and one that views the body as a socio-ecological assemblage. We contend these two approaches are not mutually exclusive an…
Nutrition sensitive agriculture
The wazan janch
The Gendered Impacts of Covid-19 amid Agrarian Distress
COVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes surprising ways. We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial st…
Digesting agriculture development
Forging just dietary futures
Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight, obesity and chronic disease are simultaneously on the rise. Moreover, while volumes of robust research on causes and solutions to malnutrition have been published, and calls for interdisciplinarity are on the rise, researchers taking different epistemological and methodological choices have largely remained disciplinari…
Self-help groups as platforms for development
Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However, there is currently little understanding as to whether SHGs are effective or equitable platforms for delivering health or livelihoods interventions. Social capital is hypothesized as a comparative advantage when utilizing SHGs as development platforms, however the specific mechan…
The politics of mobility and empowerment
Within the empowerment literature, “freedom of movement” or “mobility” are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded …
Spaces for women
Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sectoral roots through re-diversifying agricultural production while integrating women's empowerment and nutrition behavior-change communication components. For these integrated nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, women-led self-help groups have emerged as promising platforms for program delivery. Yet, while well-designed nutrition behavior-change com…
The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's Covid-19 response
India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as 'COVID warriors' engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically …
It doesn't bother me
Equity and empowerment effects
Community health workers (CHW) are individuals with no formal health training who perform various roles to address health disparities. There are long-sustained debates over how different forms of incentives shape CHW programs, which are often staffed with volunteer or minimally remunerated women. These debates are complicated by the diversity of CHW roles and contexts in which they work. Evidence is particularly scant around "change-agent" style …
Inflammatory agriculture
Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that ma…
The Women Farmer Stress Inventory
PURPOSE: While women identifying as primary farmers have increased in the United States, there has not been research focused on the antecedents of stress and quality of life among women farmers in particular. This study set out to construct a Women Farmer Stress Inventory (WFSI), test its dimensionality, and assess its criterion-related validity by looking at its relationship with subjective wellbeing as measured by the Satisfaction with Life Sca…
Being a woman with the “skills of a man”
There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly l…
Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India
Women's self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition interve…
Introduction to the special issue on bodies, health, environments
Centering the body in agricultural development
Frustrated farmers and the fee simple
Natural farming for whom? Environmental justice and state-led chemical-free farming promotion in India
India's government has recently begun promoting ‘agroecological' agriculture through the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). While NMNF is framed as a strategy to improve farmer incomes, health and nutrition, and environmental sustainability, little research has examined its justice implications. Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic research from two districts in eastern Madhya Pradesh, this paper analyzes NMNF through an environmental…
Unpacking women farmers
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Economic growth (15 works) · Economics (15 works) · Agriculture (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works)