I am pleased to inform you that following the director search process, Professor Shubhra Gururani was offered the position, and she has accepted it.
Shubhra Gururani is Associate Professor and former Chair and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Anthropology. She has been an active member of YCAR since it was founded in 2002 and previously served as Centre’s Associate Director and Graduate Diploma Coordinator. Professor Gururani also served as the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program, Interim Director of City Institute, and co-chair of the YUFA’s Race Equity Caucus.
Her academic research focuses on contemporary India, and she is currently engaged in several ongoing collaborations with scholars from all over Asia. As a political and an environmental anthropologist, she ethnographically explores the politics of nature/resource-making, land, inequality and exclusion. Her earlier work focused on the cultural politics of resources in the Indian Himalayas. Over the last ten years, she has shifted her attention to the processes of peripheral urbanization taking place in predominantly agrarian societies of the global South. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India’s Millennial City, Gurgaon, at the edge of New Delhi, exploring the politics of land acquisition, speculation, governance and flexible planning. She has recently co-edited three Special Issues on the topic—Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation Beyond Cities in South Asia (2018); Agrarian Urbanisation: Emerging Entanglements of Land, Labour and Capital (2021); and Engaging the Urban from the Periphery (2021). She is currently wrapping up her current projects and launching new research on urban ecologies and the politics of precision in the global South.
Professor Gururani will begin her term on 01 July 2022. She looks forward to meeting all the Centre Associates and visitors and invites suggestions and ideas for future collaborations and activities.
With best wishes,
Abidin Kusno
Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Director, York Centre for Asian Research
York University