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Research Interests
Gender and globalization, transnational feminisms, global justice, particularly climate justice movements and human rights.
Biography
Manisha Desai is the Empowerment Charitable Trust Endowed Professor of Global Citizenship, the Executive Director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power and a professor in the Department of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include transnational feminism, women’s human rights, gender and globalization, and contemporary Indian society. Methodologically, her work theorizes with marginalized communities in their pursuit of social justice and investigates power dynamics in knowledge production and advocates for co-produced knowledge to transform unequal social relations. Manisha employs a critical feminist lens that seeks to decolonize knowledge production and contribute to social justice even as it problematizes those efforts.
Currently, she is engaged in understanding with women farmers in Maharashtra India, how their women led climate resilient farming is transforming not only their food production and consumption but also their social and political relations relationships within their families and communities. With colleagues at SBU she is collaborating in community and arts engaged climate justice research on Long Island and coordinating a Mellon-Sawyer funded grant on AI and the practice of democracy and academic freedom at SBU.
She is also a member of the Global Research and Action Network on the Eco- Social Contract coordinated by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the Green Economy Coalition and is a representative of the Sociologists for Women in Society at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.