Please visit my Google Scholar page for the most recent list of publications. Please contact me if you would like access to a full text PDF of any article. 

Spaces for women: Rethinking behavior change communication in the context of women’s groups and nutrition-sensitive agriculture. (2021)

Social Science & Medicine, 285,114282. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114282

 

• Engages debates on health behavior change communication (BCC) ethics and efficacy.

• Examines modified participatory learning and action (PLA) run in women's groups.

• Finds women were drawn to simple, actionable messages they emotionally related to.

• Insufficient investment in volunteers' PLA facilitation skills hampered impact.

• There is need for more BCC focused on women as women, rather than mothers.

​

Self-help groups as platforms for development: The role of social capital. (2021)

World Development, 146, 105575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105575

 

•Self-help groups (SHGs) are now viewed as promising platforms for multiple development interventions for several reasons.

• Study provides qualitative insights on dynamics of SHG meeting attendance in SHG-led health intervention in India.

• Finds meeting regularity and attendance are barriers to wide coverage, particularly for most vulnerable women.

• Social capital developed between SHGs and sponsor organization is critical to successfully layer health interventions.

• Social capital between SHG and sponsoring organization is developed through benefits received from past association.

​

The wazan janch: The body-mass index and the socio-spatial politics of health promotion in rural India. (2020).  

Social Science and Medicine, 258, 113071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113071

​

•Body-mass index (BMI) camps are held in rural India where undernutrition is significant.

• Social spaces of BMI's use are linked to the types of health responsibility produced.

• Intimate BMI exercises situate responsibility with local culture and a neglectful state.

• Large, impersonal BMI camps led to responsibility being individualized to bodies.

• Nutrition behavior change is goal of BMI camps, yet is stymied by structural poverty.

​

Nutrition sensitive agriculture: An equity-based analysis from India. (2020).

World Development, 133, 105004. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105004

 

•Nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) projects are increasingly common, yet little research has examined its equity aspects.

• Paddy transplanting, which is labor and time-intensive, was a main barrier to adoption of NSA practices.

• Not all farmers transplanted paddy and there were a cultural politics of ‘modern’ paddy promoted in self-help groups (SHGs).

• Due to recognitional and economic barriers, some farmers were not active in SHG activities or shared in benefits of NSA.

• For NSA programs to be more effective, they should use an approach based on recognitional equity and cognitive justice.

​

Towards an integrated political ecology of health and bodies (2020, co-authored with Vincent Del Casino).  

Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520946489

 

•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.

•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 and might be held in tension for more nuanced analyses.

•We analyze non-communicable diseases in India to exemplify this integrated framework’s analytical potentials.

​

The gendered impacts of COVID-19 amidst agrarian distress: Opportunities for comprehensive policy response in agrarian South Asia. (2020, co-authored with Jalali, F., Ali, S. S., Gupta, D., Shrestha, S., & Fischer, H)

Politics & Gender,  1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1743923x20000483

 

•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.

•We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial stress in responding to food insecurity, and growing expectations to fulfill public roles in disease response measures. 

•We also find that the return of male migrants and youth has, in some cases, reduced women's farming responsibilities and created opportunities for household togetherness at a time of great uncertainty.

•We conclude that more research is needed to examine the nuanced aspects of COVID-19's gendered labor impacts to create comprehensive policy responses to address the multiple and sometimes conflicting effects the lockdown has had on agrarian women's informal labor and well-being.

​

Geographic contingency, affective facts, and the politics of global nutrition policy. (2019).

Geoforum, 105(June), 179–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.021

​

•Global health organizations focused on nutrition have developed an intense focus on the first 1000-days of human life (from the point of conception to age 2) as a time determining health and global economic futures.  

•This paper uses the two distinct orientations of the concept of contingency to understand how this narrative has achieved global prominence, and how it has manifested in particular configurations within India.

• First, this paper investigates how the 1000-days discourse's ascendance has been achieved through the notion of future life as open-ended contingency.

• Second, the paper analyzes qualitative data from Indian policy actors to find that Indian responses to 1000-days discourse have been mixed due to the particular socio-political legacies of India as a postcolonial space.

•This paper's main argument is that while the threat/opportunity of future contingency discursively drives 1000-days, it is simultaneously geographical contingency that complicates the ways it materializes in the particular space of India.

​

Millets, Milk and Maggi: Contested processes of the nutrition transition in rural India. (2017)

Agriculture and Human Values 34(4) 871-885. doi:10.1007/s10460-017-9781-0

​

​•The nutrition transition—a process of dietary change that describes the shift to calorie-dense, higher fat and protein diets from cereal based ones—is happening in India.

​•Analyzing data collected from the Kumaon Hills, Uttarakhand in 2013, this paper suggest aspects of the nutrition transition have developed unevenly over space and time.

​•While new types of calorie dense foods have infiltrated these rural, remote areas, the process has been uneven and contested due to preexisting social practices.

​•Moreover though incomes are rising, the predicted increases in high value, protein rich foods may actually be declining.

​•The nutrition transition literature needs more ethnographic and in-depth qualitative methods to form better policies relevant to the contingencies of dietary and epidemiological change.

​

Time Ni Hota Hai: time poverty and food security in the Kumaon hills, India. (2016) 

Gender, Place & Culture 23(10): 1404-1419. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2016.1160871

 

​•This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub- Himalayan North India community 

​•It 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. 

​•This analysis suggests that while FNS programs and policies might sometimes lend short-term relief to FNS, the greatest threat to FNS comes from the ways that the home spaces of women and their household work are devalued through development practices. 

​

Shifting production/shifting consumption: a political ecology of health perceptions in Kumaon, India. (2015) 

Geoforum 64: 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.018

​

 • This paper analyzes qualitative data from Uttarakhand, North India to examine how state-led shifts in agricultural production have resulted in changing food consumption practices and diminished perceptions of health.

​• I find villagers link decreased health to increased chemicals in home-produced food, greater dependence on the market for food purchases, and generational changes in dietary preferences.

​• I argue that within shifting landscapes of agriculture production and food consumption, notions of diminished health are indicative of the complex and always incomplete processes of subject formation.

​• I view shifting health perceptions as intimate bodily resistances to agricultural development

​• I conclude that within agricultural development programs a focus on bodily health and well-being is a fecund platform for further experimental research that seeks to imagine development differently.