Speaker: Vinay Gidwani, Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota

Vinay Gidwani navigates an uneven ideoscape consisting of Marxist geography, neoclassical economics, agrarian studies, and environmental science to arrive at his present home in Geography and the Institute of Global Studies. Close engagement with disparate intellectual traditions, which often disagree on issues of epistemology and politics, has been a source of creative tension. Gidwani’s approach to theory and praxis reflects this. Although he studies issues of work, poverty, livelihoods, and agroecological change within the Indian context, his scholarship is defined by research problematics rather than by regional affiliation. He draws liberally on Africanist, Latin American, and Southeast Asian scholarship for insights.