Person

Natasha Maru

Natasha Maru

PhD Student

Email

N.Maru@ids.ac.uk

Natasha has a multidisciplinary social sciences background with experience working with smallholder farmers and pastoralists in India.

She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, during which she researched resource related contestations among a pastoralist community in western India. Currently working with the Pastoralist Knowledge Hub at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Natasha is keen on bringing pastoral voices into global policy processes.

Through her PhD research with the PASTRES project, Natasha wishes to use approaches from geography, anthropology and political ecology to broaden conceptions of pastoral mobility. She is interested in nomadism, resource rights, the commons, micropolitics, and living life in technicolor.

Research

Project

PASTRES: Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience

PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) is a research project which aims to learn from the ways that pastoralists respond to uncertainty, applying such 'lessons from the margins' to global challenges.

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Opinions

Opinion

Natasha Maru on pastoralism and temporality in Kutch

Natasha Maru worked with pastoralists in the Kutch region of Gujarat during her doctoral research with the PASTRES programme. In this video, she talks about the focus of her study and the methods she used, which pay attention to the relationships between mobility and time.

Natasha Maru
Natasha Maru

30 September 2022

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Publications

Journal Article

COVID-19 and Pastoralism: Reflections from Three Continents

The Journal Peasant Studies;

Focusing on pastoralism, this article reflects on five diverse cases across Africa, Asia and Europe and asks: how have COVID-19 disease control measures affected mobility and production practices, marketing opportunities, land control, labour relations, local community support and...

Giulia Simula
Giulia Simula & 5 others

21 October 2020

Journal Article

A Relational View of Pastoral (Im)Mobilities

Nomadic Peoples;24

Pitched against the apparently more civilised and modern ‘settled’, pastoralists have historically been penalised for the seemingly primitive and outdated practice of mobility. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in western India, this paper challenges this reductive dichotomy and unpacks...

Natasha Maru
Natasha Maru

1 October 2020

Journal

Fifty Years of Research on Pastoralism and Development

IDS Bulletin 51.1A

This archive IDS Bulletin reflects on 50 years of research on pastoralism at IDS. Much has changed, but there are also important continuities. The ‘end of pastoralism’ was proclaimed widely in the 1970s, yet, as a successful, resilient livelihood adapted to some of the harshest...

Ian Scoones
Ian Scoones & 9 others

27 May 2020

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Natasha Maru’s recent work

News

Why pastoralism matters for debates on biodiversity at COP15

Between 7-19 December, delegates from nearly 200 countries will gather in Montreal for Biodiversity COP15, the first UN conference on biodiversity since 2018. Touted as a ‘make or break’ moment following the failure to meet any of the Aichi targets on biodiversity between 2011-2020,...

7 December 2022

News

New primer on livestock, food and climate ahead of COP27

In recent years livestock production has been criticized for contributing to the climate crisis. Several groups, including corporate lobbies and environmentalists alike, have called for a reduction in meat and milk consumption and a shift towards more plant-based diets. But these simplistic and...

14 October 2022

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