Bio

Dr Richa Minocha’s research foregrounds ecological communities and women, emphasising indigenous and spiritual knowledge as a significant basis for decolonising gender and ecology. Her research utilises feminist political ecology approaches and borrows from and informs Gender and Development Studies. Her publications are on the themes of Social Justice, Ecological-Cultural Interlinkages in Development, Sustainable Tourism, Engendering Food Security, Ecological Livelihoods, Academic/Community Service Learning, and Ecofeminist frameworks for analysing development and displacement. In 2021, she published along with her Gender Studies students on the theme- “Social Singularities in Cosmic Environments: Engendering Big History”. As a researcher in the Institute of Integrated Himalayan Studies and for her fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she conducted intensive village surveys, as well as observed urbanisation trends, looking at the transformation and its gendered impacts in rural-urban peripheries in Himachal Pradesh.

Currently, her research engages with Feminist Pedagogies in Liberal Arts classrooms, drawing from frameworks that mainstream empathy and justice-related issues in discourse, research and community engagement. Hence, she highlights that such pedagogies require that concepts should not be treated as 'given', and vocabularies and expressions should be built on unambiguous connections between theory, research and experience. Other than Himachal Pradesh, she has conducted research in Kutch in Gujarat and in Pune and the suburbs in Maharashtra. She is currently working on a paper titled Envisioning and Engendering Food and Water Justice: Pedagogical Collaboration between DePaul University and Symbiosis International University, along with Prof. Howard Rosing, which is being prepared for the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society.