Affiliated with the Cultural Studies Graduate Program.

Research Interests

Scott is an Associate Professor in Global Development Studies and the Cultural Studies Graduate Program. His research interests include transnational Canadian social and cultural history and histories of anti-colonial movements in North America. He is the co-editor of Canada and The Third World: Overlapping Histories (University of Toronto Higher Education Press, 2015) and wrote Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

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On leave January 1, 2027-June 30, 2027.

Research Interests

I have over twenty years of experience in environment and development research, teaching, and advising, with a focus on how gender, equity, and environmental change intersect. My work explores issues of social and environmental justice in agriculture, water governance, rural-urban livelihoods, climate change adaptation, and disaster response in Southeast Asia. using a feminist political ecology perspective, I study how power shapes everyday lives and development policies, and how interventions can be more responsive to real-world contexts and experiences.

I welcome students interested in taking critical and grounded approaches to questions such as:

• How gender, intersectionality, and climate change are experienced and contested
• How everyday practices of socioecological reproduction (care) sustain rural communities
• How colonial and patriarchal logics shape water infrastructure and "green" climate solutions
• How emerging just transition experiences in natural resource use systems can foster more equitable futures

I work closely with students to promote creativity, critical thinking, and socially engaged scholarship that bridges theory and practice.

Supervision

I am eager to supervise master's, doctoral, and postdoctoral projects within the nexus of feminist political ecology and decolonial aspects of critical development studies. I am particularly interested in projects related to social, gender, and environmental justice that critically examine climate change solutions, sustainable development, and the often-overlooked silent impacts and slow violence of resource extraction and various forms of displacement. I am also interested in exploring the politics of transitions and alternative strategies to development that position socioecological reproduction at the core of their vision and practice.

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Research Interests

Professor Quadir specializes in International Development, International Relations and International Political Economy. His research focuses on cosmopolitan citizenship, South-South cooperation, Southern (emerging) donors, aid effectiveness, good governance, civil society, democratic consolidation, transnational social movements, human security and regional development.

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Cross-appointed to the Department of Geography and Planning and the School of Environmental Studies.

On leave January 1, 2027-June 30, 2027.

Research Interests

My research revolves around debates over public versus private service delivery (with a focus on water, electricity and health care), but encompasses a broad spectrum of related questions on urbanization, environmental justice and uneven development. Much of this research has been conducted through the Municipal Services Project, which I founded and have been Director of since 2000.  The focus of this project is 'alternatives to privatization', with research partners in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. We work with academics, social movements, labour unions and community groups to deepen our grassroots engagement and create research products that are relevant and useful to the communities and organizations most affected by these debates.

Theoretically, I am interested in competing conceptions of 'public' and how they have changed and been transformed under neoliberalism. As a (marxian) political economist my focus is on the financial, institutional and ideological structures that tie everyday service delivery to the larger currents of (re)production, but I am also interested in socio-cultural concepts of space and place that make up the connectivities of public engagement.  My research has had a largely urban focus, including the growing networks of 'world cities'.

Finally, I spent a number of years working on cross-border migration in Southern Africa. I am no longer directly involved in this work but remain interested in questions of migration and xenophobia.

Supervision

I supervise graduate students in all three of the departments I am affiliated with (Global Development Studies, Geography, and Environmental Studies). I encourage applications from students focused on topics related to my research interests, and in particular on debates around public/private service provision in the Global South.

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Research Interests

Indigenous studies in Canada and North America.

Dr. Kumar is also the Placement Coordinator for Global Development Studies work study courses DEVS 410/411 and DEVS 420.

Administrative Email: devs.ugchair@queensu.ca

On leave July 1, 2026-December 31, 2026.

Research Interests

Tradition-modernity, Hindu Right and Religious revivalism, Globalisation and agriculture, Development ethics.

My research interest has ranged widely in the field of development studies, and is grounded in both development theory as well as development practice. My PhD work is on Implanting of an Ideology: Television, Politics and Making of the Hindu Right in Contemporary India. The central concern of my research is to understand why and how people's consciousness emerges at different moments of crisis in history as a revivification of a cultural past and how regimes re-appropriate this imaginary to gain legitimacy. My research examines how the rapid process of liberalisation in India facilitated the rise of a proto-fascist Hindu nationalist movement, and how this movement gained dominance both through its linkage with national and international capital, and through the techno-innovative repackaging of the Hindu epic, Ramayan. It demonstrates that the televised version of the epic re-interpreted histories, re-arranged popular symbols, rituals and folk tales of non-conformist subaltern groups, and portrayed Indian history as a history of a Hindu nation thus endowing 'Hindu' identity with clearer outlines and greater substance. My research places the rise of the Hindu Right into a wider comparative historical context, questioning the presumed positive relationship between economic growth and the spread of democracy, spearheaded by a rising new middle class.

I have also broadened my research interests to globalisation, agriculture, transnational corporations and indigenous knowledge systems through my participation in a collaborative research between Queen's University and Indian Institute on Technology, Chennai, India. This joint project examined the linkages between local community knowledge of plant genetic resources in communities in India and the ways in which these knowledge systems are integrated into an international political economic legal system. My research explored the linkages between the major transnational corporations and research and development in the area of Plant Genetic Resources. It identified the reasons and processes by which transnational corporations are able to incorporate local knowledge systems.

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Cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies and affiliated with Cultural Studies.

On leave July 1, 2026-December 31, 2026.

Research Interests

My current research focusses on low class, racialized migrant men working in immigrant-niche sectors in Southern Europe. In the project titled, Undocumented South Asian Male Migrants in Greece: Understanding Masculinity, Love, and Work in Troubled Times, funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant, I undertake a novel theorization on how culturally-specific norms of “failed” masculinity, precipitated by neoliberal reforms, propel migration trajectories for low-class racialized men. I argue this with a case study of undocumented male migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India who are employed in immigrant-niche sectors of agriculture and urban informal economy in Greece. Along a similar trajectory, I have begun studying how anti-immigrant discourses, far right populism, racism, and regimes of restrictive migration governance combine to determine gendered experiences of racialized lower-class migrant workers in host countries. As a PI, and working with six other colleagues, I study the flash points that trigger racial oppression from host communities against racialized migrant workers working in agriculture, gig economy or in the informal sector in Greece, Italy, and Spain.

My second project with racialized migrant male workers is a collaborative participatory action research project of Photovoice. “This is Evidence": Re-presenting South Asian Migrant Men in Greece (SSHRC Connection Grant). I collaborated with groups of South Asian migrant men in Greece who used their cell phones to take photographs, record videos, and narrate their stories. The result was a multi-media exhibition and a digital archive (www.thisisevidence.com). The installation with a reconstructed plastic shack migrant housing, photographs, video shorts, ambient audio, and maps has been held in Greece, Canada, and Belgium.

My ongoing research in India examines the role of religion, caste, and political economy in shaping relational male identities and masculinity among lower classes of rural Indian men in contemporary North India. Focussing on the same region, it analyses the crisis of masculinities faced by lower classes of rural Indian men from the early 1990s when India embarked on neoliberal reforms. I undertake a study of the dominant Hindu Jat caste, the religious minority of the Meo, and the Dalits (formerly untouchables) to understand how male privilege and masculine norms are dislocated by market-led growth policies.

My doctoral work, Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Contemporary India: Examining the Link Between Cross-region Marriages, Neoliberal Capitalism, and New Forms of Gender Subordination focussed on marriage migration in rural North India. My research makes theoretical and empirical contributions in feminist political economy and migration studies by foregrounding dispossession in the most intimate of human relations – marriage. My monograph, Why Would I Be Married Here is based on this research.

Supervision

I welcome graduate students interested in topics related to migration, masculinity, India, and gender in the Global South. I also welcome students in broad topics of interest related to caste, marriage-migration, and collaborative visual research methods.

Research Interests

• Political Ecology
• Sustainable Livelihoods
• Political Economy, Participatory Research Methods
• Monitoring and Evaluation Methodology 

My research interests are rooted in my experiences from 1997-2003 as a researcher, active participant, and project manager with the Coastal Areas Monitoring Project and Laboratory (CAMP-Lab), a participatory resource management project in Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua. In its third phase, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), I facilitated a participatory research based partnership between graduate student and faculty researchers from York University and local people working with the Center for the Investigation and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) in Nicaragua.

Theoretically, I place my research interests within the context of political ecology drawing on Robin's (2004) hatchet (political ecology as critique) and seed (political ecology as equity and sustainability research) analogies. While I am appreciative of the hatchet approach that forms the core of much of the political ecology literature, my own work focuses on the seed approach to political ecology. In particular, I am interested in contributing to alternative approaches to sustainability research -- rooted in local social, political and economic reality -- that contribute to possibilities for moving towards more sustainable local livelihoods. The process of theorizing and contributing to these types of alternatives are often vulnerable to critiques related to the essentialization of the local people and the imposition of outside values on local settings. While these critiques are valid to a point, contributing to research on alternatives to mainstream approaches to sustainable development continues to represent, in my view, the pragmatic next step if political ecology is to contribute to a more sustainable future.

Within this theoretical perspective, I am interested in pursuing academic work that supports the development of sustainable livelihoods. My approach to this task involves: 1) efforts to identify, generate, and improve development activities and interventions that are grounded in local social, political and economic realities to support environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods; and 2) efforts to develop methods that document and illustrate the value of these alternative development options so that they have greater resonance and influence with relevant donors and policymakers. 

Within the context of this overall vision, my primary research interest is centered on sustainable livelihood issues at the local level. My future research will focus on the role of local capacity, in particular social capital, and local agency in protecting and enhancing sustainable livelihoods (Krishna 2001). In particular, I am interested in working within the context of Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua and other Caribbean locations to examine the way in which variations between communities' social capital and agency capacity influence their abilities to protect and enhance the environmental assets available to them. In addition, I am interested in exploring avenues for the development and enhancement of agency capacity at the community level as a means to contribute to improved livelihoods and environmental sustainability.

Related to this focus on sustainable livelihoods, I am interested in examining the role of deficits in what Bird and Shepherd (2003) termed 'geographic capital' in limiting the sustainable livelihood possibilities and avenues for improvement in remote areas. In particular, I am interested in examining the possibilities for, and barriers to, the use of new technologies in overcoming limits to enhanced sustainable livelihood possibilities that are rooted in problems related to the high cost associated with transportation and communication in remote areas.

My secondary research interest builds on my expertise in the participatory use of the Outcome Mapping (OM) methodology for monitoring and evaluating development programs (Earl, Carden and Smutylo 2001). This method, developed by the IDRC's evaluation unit, works towards project learning and accountability by tracking a program's influence on behavioral change in its partners by using graduated progress indicators, and relating these changes to the program's strategies and practices through narratives. Research on the development and use of participatory monitoring and evaluation methods within development projects is a logical extension of my focus on local agency capacity as it represents a pathway to increased local influence over the development process.

My current research on CAMP-Lab's use of OM suggests that its focus on behavioral change makes it uniquely suited to both identify and improve the influence of development projects on environmental sustainability and local capacity development through project learning while also providing good data for institutional accountability. My future OM research will focus in two areas: 1) comparative work between projects using OM to further refine implementation methods and improve project learning results; and 2) refinement of OM's data collection and reporting methods in an effort to contribute to the method's relevance and effectiveness for influencing various development decision makers. This latter aspect of my research focuses particularly on the methodological challenges inherent in using participatory approaches to research design and data collection for consumption by bureaucratic and academic audiences unfamiliar or uncomfortable with these approaches to research.

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Administrative Email: devsgradchair@queensu.ca

Research Interests

Resource extraction; feminist political economy; settler colonialism; Indigenous resurgence; social reproduction; northern development; gender-based violence; labour.

As a feminist political economist concerned with social justice, my research examines how land and resources are accessed and organized, and how people work, care and reproduce upon these lands. My work maps the ways in which global capital draws upon gendered, racialized, and colonial structures in processes of dispossession and exploitation. At the same time, I am interested in highlighting local spaces of feminist, anti-racist and decolonizing resistance to the pressures of global capital.

Feminist Political Economy

My research, working with Indigenous communities in northern Canada, has focused on social reproduction: the daily and intergenerational work required to maintain and reproduce people, households and communities (from cooking to community education to breastfeeding to elder care). I approach social reproduction as a key site of de/colonizing struggle. To this end, I have analyzed Canadian State interventions in Indigenous social reproduction, highlighted social reproduction in Indigenous communities as a site of Indigenous resurgence; and examined shifts in social reproduction as a result of extractive projects. I have also applied social reproduction theory to analyzing gender-based violence as it operates both intimately and transnationally.

A concern with gender-based violence (GBV) weaves through all of my research. Rather than approaching GBV as an aberration from society’s norms, I am interested in examining the ways in which social and political economic structures have enabled GBV over time. I have examined feminist activism addressing GBV, State responses to GBV, and the relationship between GBV and settler colonialism.

Canadian Diamonds

My empirical focus is resource extraction, and its role in the Canadian and global political economy. My book, Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North (University of Toronto Press 2022) takes a feminist political economy approach to examining the impact of the development of diamond mines in the Yellowknife region, Northwest Territories (NWT). The book examines the – often invisibilized – labour performed by Indigenous women that reproduces the northern mixed economy, looking at the ways in which this community labour has shifted as a result of the diamond mines. Refracted Economies won the 2022 International Studies Association Global Development Studies Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Donald Smiley Book Prize (Canadian Political Science Association). I discuss Refracted Economies with Vinita Srivastava and Della Green on the podcast, “Don’t Call Me Resilient” (The Conversation).

Post-Extractive Futures

My current project, Futures of Care (SSHRC Insight Grant 2022-2027) is driven by the experiences and aspirations of Indigenous and South African communities in mine-affected areas, flipping the script from communities as “impacted” to communities as “agents”. In Canada and South Africa, resource extraction is central to economic development and the political imaginary. While both countries are over-represented in global extractive industries, they are also characterized by community-based resistance to extraction and alternative relations to land and modes of resource governance, often practiced by women, Indigenous peoples and people of colour. This is a research partnership co-led with Dr. Allison Goebel, Dr. Marc Epprecht, Dedats’eetsaa: The Tłı̨chǫ Research and Training Institute, Hotii Ts’eeda (Northwest Territories, Canada), the Society, Work and Politics Institute (South Africa), and collaborating researchers and graduate students.

Supervision

I welcome students, broadly, in the areas of political economy; social reproduction; gender, race and development; decolonization and settler colonialism; and labour.

I am currently recruiting graduate students for the Futures of Care project, described above.

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Cross Appointed to the Department of History, Cultural Studies, and the School of Environmental Studies.

On leave July 1, 2026-December 31, 2026.

Research Interests

Social history in southern Africa, especially the colonial era; gender and sexuality more broadly, especially cultural constructions of non-normative sexualities (lgbtiq+, msm, wsw, etc) and contestations around masculinities; HIV/AIDS; environment and health, especially in urban contexts in South Africa; contestations over development and human rights throughout Africa; histories of tourism; pedagogy for development (e.g., methods and ethics of work-study abroad programs); the politics of public history.

Supervision

These are topics of some of the student projects I’ve supervised over the last 15 years or so, from post-doctoral to honours theses. It’s a wide range united by my primary interest in working towards a better understanding of Africa among Canadians and to support the training of talented African students.

• Representation and resistance around gender nonconformity in Uganda, 1923 and-2023
• Crises, Care, and Communication in South Africa’s Climate Movement
• Water, Mining, and Communities: Assessing the Mokolo-Crocodile Water Augmentation Project’s Impact on Limpopo Communities
• Inclusivity and Equity Practices of Canadian Grassroot International Aid Organizations
• Tourism in Lephalale, South Africa: A Just and Sustainable Future?
• Rights, Protections, and Masculinities of IDPs with Physical Disabilities in Ethiopia
• LGBTQ and social media in Africa
• Black economic empowerment in South Africa
• African Pentecostal Immigrants in Toronto: Aspirations and Identities
• The Transition to the One-Party State in Zambia
• The impact of COVID-19 on South African environmental charity responses to the climate crisis
• Degrowth charities’ perceptions of the future for women in South Africa
• Gender-based violence in Ghana
• #Fallist Movement in South Africa
• How activists resist political homophobias in East Africa (Uganda and Rwanda)
• ‘Green Growth’ and Chinese Investment Experiences in Kenya
• Sexuality Education in Cape Town High Schools
• Narratives Surrounding Heterosexual Transmission of HIV/AIDS in Botswana
• South African women in the anti-apartheid struggle
• Funerals and HIV/AIDS stigma in South Africa
• AIDS denialism in South Africa
• Lesbian activism in South Africa
• Intersections of Post-development theory with NGO discourse
• Voluntourism
• Women’s Movement in Zimbabwe
• Street-connected children in Mombasa
• Sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Ghana
• HIV-Tuberculosis Co-infection, South Africa
• Neoliberalism and Ecosystemic Change among Tonga Farmers in Southern Zambia
• Livelihood Strategies among Dockworkers in Durban, 1900-1951
• Gender, Politics and Social Medicine in South Africa, 1940-1959
• Empowering sexual minority groups in Uganda through a green, de-growth perspective
• Race and Municipal Water Planning in Pietermaritzburg from 1900 to 1968