Kiran Asher | University of Massachusetts Amherst (original) (raw)
Published work by Kiran Asher
Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2021
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in Februa... more 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) in the Boston area. The introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. Five transcripts or "lab reports" highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience.
Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America, 2017
Asher, K. 2017. From Afro-Colombians to Afro-descendants: The Trajectory of Black Social Movement... more Asher, K. 2017. From Afro-Colombians to Afro-descendants: The Trajectory of Black Social Movements in Colombia, 1990-2010. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America. Sonia Alvarez et al, editors. Duke University Press.
Keywords in Radical Geography, 2019
Radical geography aims to know the world and change it for the better. These two goals are linked... more Radical geography aims to know the world and change it for the better. These two goals are linked to Enlightenment modernity and science. However, unlike mainstream science, in radical geography both knowledge production and struggles for justice are political, power-laden processes. 1 Furthermore, critical geographers are learning from feminist, anti-colonialists and others committed to radical social change to acknowledge that uneven capitalist development is premised on exploiting colonialised/raced, gendered, sexualised and non-human Others. Thus, addressing persistent economic and class inequities necessarily means grappling with concomitant social, sexual and environmental violence. Changing the world for the better then not only requires imagining different relationships between humans, but also between humans and nature. The task of imagining and constructing just worlds requires fieldwork. In Ecology and Political Science, the disciplines in which I was formally trained, fieldwork meant going somewhere (the "field") to collect verifiable, generalisable data about specific aspects of the environment, society, space, or politics. But extended research on ecology, economic development, and social movements revealed that such positivist approaches did not account for the messy connections between people, places, and non-human denizens of this planet. I also made the uncomfortable discovery that my research questions, categories, and field sites were overdetermined by history, politics, and my own identity as a "third world woman" (Asher 2017; Katz 1994). By "fieldwork", then, I do not refer to a method of knowing something, or the means of taking action for scientific or political ends. Rather I contend that fieldwork entails fundamentally interrogating the work done within fields of inquiry, including radical geography, to produce legible and legitimate objects and subjects of knowledge and action. Such work was gathering pace in the 1990s. Scholars from a range of disciplines anthropology , environmental history, geography, sociology-contested the technical, apolitical, and ahistorical approaches of positivist, empiricist sciences. In conjunction with colleagues from the humanities, and drawing on post-structural and post-colonial critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment, they opened up conversations about the meanings, production, affects, and effects of scientific knowledge. 2 As a field biologist, I found my way into these conversations with Donna Haraway's (1989) Primate Visions, and then via feminist writing. Feminists questioned the masculinist and essentialist assumptions pervading fields from anthropology to zoology in order to focus attention on the partial
Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America, 2017
Book chapter. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest i... more Book chapter. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America. Sonia Alvarez et al, editors. Duke University Press (2017)
GeoForum, 2019
free access until August 6, 2019
When we cannot not compare. A commentary on Tariq Jazeel’s ‘Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies’, 2019
The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and produ... more 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 capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co-production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21 st century. It shows that the Pacific low-lands are an example of " political forests " in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro-Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation.
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a... more 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 remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post-development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post-development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach. Resumen: El pos-desarrollo, la corriente de pensamiento asociada con Arturo Escobar, trata el desarrollo como una invenci on discursiva de Occidente, la cual es contrarrestada de mejor forma a trav es de la atenci on etnogr afica a saberes locales de los pueblos marginalizados por la modernidad colonial. Este enfoque ofrece alternativas al desarrollo que son m as equitativas y sustentables. El pos-desarrollo ha sido criticado rotundamente en las ultimas d ecadas. Pero, a pesar de sus deficiencias conceptuales y pol ıticas, sigue siendo la cr ıtica m as popular al desarrollo y est a resurgiendo en teor ıas decoloniales y de pluriverso. Este trabajo plantea que la corriente de pos-desarrollo como cr ıtica del desarrollo dominante ha sido agotada, y que el desarrollo merece una nueva mirada cr ıtica. Proponemos que los comprometidos con las luchas por justicia social deben revisar las premisas del pos-desarrollo y lidiar especialmente con la representaci on como una problem atica central al desarrollo. Sostenemos que la obra de Gayatri Spivak es clave para este proyecto. Ofrecemos una reseña de algunos textos claves de Spivak sobre capitalismo, diferencia y desarrollo, aclarando sus aportes para una evaluaci on cr ıtica del desarrollo dominante.
Feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-cultu... more Feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-culture linkages and conceptualize just worlds for non-humans and their human kin. In this paper, I revisit my journey of doing environmental justice research, i.e. of my feminist scientific practice in Asia and Latin America. In this retrospective telling I highlight how gender, political economy, and race were and remain fundamental in producing the subjects and objects of my research and analysis. I discuss how an implicit feminism helped me grapple with the complex nature-culture linkages I observed in the field. Postcolonial and marxist insights supplement and complement feminisms in the questions I pose as we attempt to imagine new nature-cultures.
Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renew... more 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 (2009–2014) on forests and food security and on the ways gender is said to matter. As with previous work on gender and natural resource management, we found that gender is an important variable; but how, to what degree and why are different in every context. That is, despite the suggestion of clear linkages, the relationships between gender, forests and food security are not generalizable across contexts. Understanding the relationship between forest resources and food security requires attention to gender disparities at the local level, but also to the broader political and economic context in which those disparities are reinforced. We flag the need to guard against ahistorical and technical approaches to gender and suggest some example research questions that use a more relational view of gender—one that examines how political economy and social power structure access to resources at multiple scales.
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper r... more 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 men-versus-women dichotomy and little or no attention has been paid to power and social and political relations. These gaps which are echoed in other domains of development and gender research depict a 'feminization of vulnerability' and reinforce a 'victimization' discourse within climate change studies. We argue that a critical intersectional assessment would contribute to unveil agency and emancipatory pathways in the adaptation process by providing a better understanding of how the differential impacts of climate change shape, and are shaped by, the complex power dynamics of existing social and political relations.
August 2013 marked twenty years since the passing of Law 70, which legally recognizes the ethnic,... more August 2013 marked twenty years since the passing of Law 70, which legally recognizes the ethnic, territorial, and socioeconomic rights of black communities in Colombia. In the past two decades its implementation has been mixed at best, and the actual political and economic status of most Afro-Colombians remains grim. Yet this flawed law remains an important icon and political instrument of Afro-Colombian struggles. A retrospective look at the processes and peoples that led up to Law 70 may be useful in the context of ongoing Afro-Latin struggles to obtain real and sustained cultural, political and economic rights.
The Spanish translation of my 2009 book "Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development and Natur... more The Spanish translation of my 2009 book "Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development and Nature." Lo siento no puedo añadir el pdf del libro. Pero la biblioteca del ICANH tendra una copia y supongo que La Luis Angel Arango también. Intentare añadir una parte del libro
Geoforum, Jan 1, 2009
In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 C... more In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 Colombian Constitution remakes nature and helps constitute the state in the “economically backward” but “biodiversity rich” Pacific lowlands region. We draw on Gramscian insights on hegemony and the importance of conjunctures to trace how changes in the new Constitution and global biogeopolitics reconfigure nature and state power through the mandates of sustainable development, economic growth, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Finally, we contribute to the literature on political ecology by showing how the political power of the state, nature, and capital are interwoven materially and symbolically in complex and contradictory ways.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2012
In this commentary Kiran Asher reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of the Karati... more 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.
Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2021
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in Februa... more 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) in the Boston area. The introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. Five transcripts or "lab reports" highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience.
Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America, 2017
Asher, K. 2017. From Afro-Colombians to Afro-descendants: The Trajectory of Black Social Movement... more Asher, K. 2017. From Afro-Colombians to Afro-descendants: The Trajectory of Black Social Movements in Colombia, 1990-2010. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America. Sonia Alvarez et al, editors. Duke University Press.
Keywords in Radical Geography, 2019
Radical geography aims to know the world and change it for the better. These two goals are linked... more Radical geography aims to know the world and change it for the better. These two goals are linked to Enlightenment modernity and science. However, unlike mainstream science, in radical geography both knowledge production and struggles for justice are political, power-laden processes. 1 Furthermore, critical geographers are learning from feminist, anti-colonialists and others committed to radical social change to acknowledge that uneven capitalist development is premised on exploiting colonialised/raced, gendered, sexualised and non-human Others. Thus, addressing persistent economic and class inequities necessarily means grappling with concomitant social, sexual and environmental violence. Changing the world for the better then not only requires imagining different relationships between humans, but also between humans and nature. The task of imagining and constructing just worlds requires fieldwork. In Ecology and Political Science, the disciplines in which I was formally trained, fieldwork meant going somewhere (the "field") to collect verifiable, generalisable data about specific aspects of the environment, society, space, or politics. But extended research on ecology, economic development, and social movements revealed that such positivist approaches did not account for the messy connections between people, places, and non-human denizens of this planet. I also made the uncomfortable discovery that my research questions, categories, and field sites were overdetermined by history, politics, and my own identity as a "third world woman" (Asher 2017; Katz 1994). By "fieldwork", then, I do not refer to a method of knowing something, or the means of taking action for scientific or political ends. Rather I contend that fieldwork entails fundamentally interrogating the work done within fields of inquiry, including radical geography, to produce legible and legitimate objects and subjects of knowledge and action. Such work was gathering pace in the 1990s. Scholars from a range of disciplines anthropology , environmental history, geography, sociology-contested the technical, apolitical, and ahistorical approaches of positivist, empiricist sciences. In conjunction with colleagues from the humanities, and drawing on post-structural and post-colonial critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment, they opened up conversations about the meanings, production, affects, and effects of scientific knowledge. 2 As a field biologist, I found my way into these conversations with Donna Haraway's (1989) Primate Visions, and then via feminist writing. Feminists questioned the masculinist and essentialist assumptions pervading fields from anthropology to zoology in order to focus attention on the partial
Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America, 2017
Book chapter. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest i... more Book chapter. Pp. 261-290 in Beyond Civil Society Agenda: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America. Sonia Alvarez et al, editors. Duke University Press (2017)
GeoForum, 2019
free access until August 6, 2019
When we cannot not compare. A commentary on Tariq Jazeel’s ‘Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies’, 2019
The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and produ... more 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 capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co-production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21 st century. It shows that the Pacific low-lands are an example of " political forests " in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro-Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation.
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a... more 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 remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post-development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post-development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach. Resumen: El pos-desarrollo, la corriente de pensamiento asociada con Arturo Escobar, trata el desarrollo como una invenci on discursiva de Occidente, la cual es contrarrestada de mejor forma a trav es de la atenci on etnogr afica a saberes locales de los pueblos marginalizados por la modernidad colonial. Este enfoque ofrece alternativas al desarrollo que son m as equitativas y sustentables. El pos-desarrollo ha sido criticado rotundamente en las ultimas d ecadas. Pero, a pesar de sus deficiencias conceptuales y pol ıticas, sigue siendo la cr ıtica m as popular al desarrollo y est a resurgiendo en teor ıas decoloniales y de pluriverso. Este trabajo plantea que la corriente de pos-desarrollo como cr ıtica del desarrollo dominante ha sido agotada, y que el desarrollo merece una nueva mirada cr ıtica. Proponemos que los comprometidos con las luchas por justicia social deben revisar las premisas del pos-desarrollo y lidiar especialmente con la representaci on como una problem atica central al desarrollo. Sostenemos que la obra de Gayatri Spivak es clave para este proyecto. Ofrecemos una reseña de algunos textos claves de Spivak sobre capitalismo, diferencia y desarrollo, aclarando sus aportes para una evaluaci on cr ıtica del desarrollo dominante.
Feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-cultu... more Feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-culture linkages and conceptualize just worlds for non-humans and their human kin. In this paper, I revisit my journey of doing environmental justice research, i.e. of my feminist scientific practice in Asia and Latin America. In this retrospective telling I highlight how gender, political economy, and race were and remain fundamental in producing the subjects and objects of my research and analysis. I discuss how an implicit feminism helped me grapple with the complex nature-culture linkages I observed in the field. Postcolonial and marxist insights supplement and complement feminisms in the questions I pose as we attempt to imagine new nature-cultures.
Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renew... more 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 (2009–2014) on forests and food security and on the ways gender is said to matter. As with previous work on gender and natural resource management, we found that gender is an important variable; but how, to what degree and why are different in every context. That is, despite the suggestion of clear linkages, the relationships between gender, forests and food security are not generalizable across contexts. Understanding the relationship between forest resources and food security requires attention to gender disparities at the local level, but also to the broader political and economic context in which those disparities are reinforced. We flag the need to guard against ahistorical and technical approaches to gender and suggest some example research questions that use a more relational view of gender—one that examines how political economy and social power structure access to resources at multiple scales.
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper r... more 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 men-versus-women dichotomy and little or no attention has been paid to power and social and political relations. These gaps which are echoed in other domains of development and gender research depict a 'feminization of vulnerability' and reinforce a 'victimization' discourse within climate change studies. We argue that a critical intersectional assessment would contribute to unveil agency and emancipatory pathways in the adaptation process by providing a better understanding of how the differential impacts of climate change shape, and are shaped by, the complex power dynamics of existing social and political relations.
August 2013 marked twenty years since the passing of Law 70, which legally recognizes the ethnic,... more August 2013 marked twenty years since the passing of Law 70, which legally recognizes the ethnic, territorial, and socioeconomic rights of black communities in Colombia. In the past two decades its implementation has been mixed at best, and the actual political and economic status of most Afro-Colombians remains grim. Yet this flawed law remains an important icon and political instrument of Afro-Colombian struggles. A retrospective look at the processes and peoples that led up to Law 70 may be useful in the context of ongoing Afro-Latin struggles to obtain real and sustained cultural, political and economic rights.
The Spanish translation of my 2009 book "Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development and Natur... more The Spanish translation of my 2009 book "Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development and Nature." Lo siento no puedo añadir el pdf del libro. Pero la biblioteca del ICANH tendra una copia y supongo que La Luis Angel Arango también. Intentare añadir una parte del libro
Geoforum, Jan 1, 2009
In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 C... more In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 Colombian Constitution remakes nature and helps constitute the state in the “economically backward” but “biodiversity rich” Pacific lowlands region. We draw on Gramscian insights on hegemony and the importance of conjunctures to trace how changes in the new Constitution and global biogeopolitics reconfigure nature and state power through the mandates of sustainable development, economic growth, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Finally, we contribute to the literature on political ecology by showing how the political power of the state, nature, and capital are interwoven materially and symbolically in complex and contradictory ways.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2012
In this commentary Kiran Asher reflects on the theoretical and ethical implications of the Karati... more 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.