Dr Saba Joshi
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Saba Joshi is a Lecturer in Gender and Development in the Department of Politics and International Relations and is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) at the University of York. Her research focuses on gender in international relations, land governance and agrarian change, with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia.

Prior to taking up her position in York in 2021, Saba was a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. She has also held visiting scholar positions at the Department of Food and Resource Economics and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and the Centre for East and Southeast Asia, Lund University. 

Saba obtained her PhD in Political Science/International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in 2020. She also holds MA degrees in Politics and International Studies from IHEID and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and a BA in History from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

Research

Overview

Saba's current research interests comprise of three interlinked strands, namely gender in international political economy, land dispossession and agrarian politics, and ‘hybrid’/authoritarian states. These three themes coalesce in Saba's research on the politics of land grabbing in contemporary Cambodia and India.

Saba's research on Cambodia unpacks the dynamics of dispossession caused by large-scale land acquisitions for agri-businesses and resource extraction, drawing on extensive field-based research. Here, Saba focussed on contentious politics around land dispossession, particularly resistance involving women and indigenous peoples. Saba has also studied the gendered politics of dispossession across three states in India (supported by an Early Post.doc Mobility research grant awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation- 2020-2021) and reverse migration during the Covid-19 pandemic in rural India.

Since 2015, Saba has been a member of a multidisciplinary academic research project called DEMETER examining gender equality, the right to food and land commercialization in Cambodia and Ghana, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Swiss Development Corporation. In this project, Saba engaged in an inter-disciplinary, collaborative, and comparative research with colleagues based in Switzerland, Cambodia, and Ghana.

Saba has an allied interest in understanding global policy processes linked to gender equality, and the construction of gender global governance linked to agriculture, food security and land. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Foundational Issues in Global Development - POL00009C
• Politics of Development - POL00009I
• Introduction to the Politics of Development - POL00017I
• Issues and Skills in Global Development - POL00056I

Publications

Selected publications

• 2022: Gendered repertoires of contention: women’s resistance, authoritarian state formation, and land grabbing in Cambodia, International Journal of Feminist Politics, Volume 24 - Issue 2. (Winner of Enloe Award)
  2021. Prügl, E and Joshi, S.: “Productive Farmers and Vulnerable Food Securers: Contradictions of Gender Expertise in International Food Security Discourse.” The Journal of Peasant Studies
• 2020. Joshi, S.: “Contesting land grabs, negotiating statehood: the politics of international accountability mechanisms in rural Cambodia”. Third World Quarterly. Volume 41, Issue 9 
• 2020. Joshi, S.: “Working Wives: Gender, Labour and Land Commercialization in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.” Globalizations. Volume 17, Issue 1,