Prof. Shaila Seshia Galvin

Profile

Shaila Seshia Galvin is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines intersecting processes of agrarian and environmental change. Her abiding interests in this intersection have led her to focus particularly on how emerging practices of sustainability—from organic agriculture to climate change mitigation—become bureaucratized and standardized, and with what implications for human-environment relations more broadly. 

Her book Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya (Yale University Press, 2021) explores how the the rise of commercial organic agriculture, and along with it, third-party certification, standardisation and contract farming, reshapes the relations of nature and agriculture, state bureaucracies and agricultural markets, farmers and agrarian intermediaries, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.  A research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Accounting for Nature: Agriculture and Mitigation in the Era of Global Climate Change, will run from 2021-2026. This project aims to generate new understandings of mitigation by studying intersections of agriculture and bioeconomies, as well as the proliferation of audit technologies and accounting methodologies as tools of environmental management and governance. 

Shaila Seshia Galvin received her PhD from Yale University in Anthropology and Environmental Studies, and also holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Thematic expertise

• Climate change & natural disasters
• Environmental governance & policies
• Extractive economies, commodities & natural resources
• Sustainability, sustainable development & SDGs
• Energy & clean technologies
• Conservation & biodiversity
• Development, cooperation, aid policies
• Intersectional inequalities & emancipation
• State-building, sovereignty
• Colonialism, decolonisation & postcolonialism

Geographical expertise

• Canada
• India

Theme

• Civil Society
• Development and Cooperation
• Global Governance
• Environment and the Anthropocene
• Sustainability and SDGs
• Gender, Class, Race and Intersectionality
• Democracy and Sovereignty
• Justice, Equity and Inclusion