Mayuri is currently pursuing her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia). Her project, funded by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, examines how gender is conceptualized and incorporated into state-led forest management practices in Tripura, which is a small federal state in the peripheral region of Northeast India. She is particularly interested in exploring three interlinked issues: – (i) How do forest-dwelling tribal communities perceive and relate to state-managed forests around them, especially under the neoliberal era of environmental governance, community-based conservation, and state-led development? (ii) How and why is gender invoked, performed and contested through everyday activities of tribal men and women in such forests? (iii) How are subjectivities reproduced, negotiated and contested at intersections of state-led development and complex ecological changes in forests? Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach and conceptually draws from feminist political ecology, natural resource management, and development studies.
Before joining UBC, she completed her PhD in Development Studies from the University of New South Wales in 2015. Her doctoral dissertation examined the impacts of state-led development on a numerically small tribal community in Tripura. She has completed her MA and MPhil degrees from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) in political studies. Her research work has been funded by the UBC-Vice President Research Prize (2017-2019), Banting postdoctoral fellowship (2017-2019), Endeavour Postgraduate Award (2010-2014), UNSW Post-Graduate Research Student Grant (2014) and University Grants Commission Fellowship for MPhil (2008-2010).
