I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment and Director of the Environment and Development Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
At the LSE, I co-organize the Social Life of Climate Change initiative and I am a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
My research is broadly concerned with political economies and ecologies of development, and the social movements that address them. My work sheds light on the ways that development interventions and knowledge systems shape communities and landscapes. Broadly, I am interested in questions about the social life of climate change. This includes: first, how the idea of climate change idea of climate change shapes social worlds in the present. And second, how historical and existing power relations shape the experience of environmental change as well as strategies for responding to these changes. My recent research engages with these questions specifically through an examination of how the legacies of empire shape contemporary climate change adaptation interventions.
I am also an editor of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
My work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the Fulbright Program and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, and has received awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the British Association for South Asian Studies, the British Sociological Association, and Geoforum. In 2025 I was a winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Geography.
At the LSE, I co-organize the Social Life of Climate Change initiative and I am a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
My research is broadly concerned with political economies and ecologies of development, and the social movements that address them. My work sheds light on the ways that development interventions and knowledge systems shape communities and landscapes. Broadly, I am interested in questions about the social life of climate change. This includes: first, how the idea of climate change idea of climate change shapes social worlds in the present. And second, how historical and existing power relations shape the experience of environmental change as well as strategies for responding to these changes. My recent research engages with these questions specifically through an examination of how the legacies of empire shape contemporary climate change adaptation interventions.
I am also an editor of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
My work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the Fulbright Program and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, and has received awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the British Association for South Asian Studies, the British Sociological Association, and Geoforum. In 2025 I was a winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Geography.