I am broadly interested in nature-society relationships, political ecology, development geography, feminist theories, and water resources management. My recent research has primarily focused on the gender, class, and policy implications of water management in Bangladesh, with an emphasis on drinking water problems from arsenic contamination of groundwater. I have focused on the ways that discourses of participation, community, decentralization and gender equity operate in water management, and in development more broadly, and the implications such discourses have on the ground. I analyze the ways that water management espouses such narratives, and the ways that complications arise from agencies of both humans and nature in such discourses and practices. A main thrust of the research is to understand the processes by which marginalization, inequalities, and power relations operate in the context of socio-ecological change and development endeavours.

I have research interests more broadly in gender, environment, and development issues in the global South, and ways by which development and privatization of natural resources affect men and women of different social strata across sites and scales. I am currently interested in the ways governance of water in Bangladesh is affecting the poor, and what this means for goals of development, social justice, and understandings/realizations of the right to water. This research in embedded within broader interests in neoliberal water governance and urban environmental practices. This research is currently focusing on Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In addition, I am also interested in climate change, socio-ecological impacts, and adaptaion. This research focuses on the coastal areas of South Asia, and looks at climate change adaptation politics in the context of development politics, gender inequalities, and social practices.  Water continues to be an important factor in this research, as does the attention to gendered dynamics of vulnerabilities and livelihood strategies.

Furthermore, my interests also include transboundary river sharing, particularly the dispute over the Ganges River in South Asia. I have been interested in the ways that socio-ecological transformation from changing river dynamics and hydrology affect not only lives and livelihoods but also international political relations and discourses of development within and between nation-states.

More generally, I have long been interested in issues of political ecology of development as conceptualized and enacted by large international/multi-national entities, and the ways by which such conceptualizations interact with local understandings of ‘environmental management’ or ‘development’. In this respect, I am interested in environmental governance and the politics of knowledge production, whereby ideational and material realities co-produce and challenge projects and practices.

Methodologically, I am interested in both quantitative and qualitative methods, with particular interest in issues of fieldwork, positionality and power relations, and research ethics.

I am involved in several professional and academic bodies, such as the Association of American Geographers, the Institute of British Geographer with the Royal Geographical Society, the Gender and Water Alliance, Bangladesh Environment Network,  and the British Association for South Asian Studies. I am also a member of the Participatory Geographies Working Group (PyGyWG) of the RGS/IBG.