Historically, industrialized countries have created our climate crisis but have yet to take responsibility for the development dilemmas associated with climate change. The solutions proposed at the international level have largely prioritized technical fixes, including new cooking technologies and carbon credit accounting. Highlighting perspectives from below – the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people – illuminates several problems with these approaches.

Using feminist and anthropological methods to study biomass stoves and efforts to improve them in India, Dr. Khandelwal identifies problems related to carbon market solutions and their associated power dynamics to shed new light on the nexus of cooking technologies, biomass-based livelihoods, gender, and climate change and to expand the kinds of solutions we imagine as possible.

Meena Khandelwal is a feminist anthropologist known for her pioneering research on Hindu celibacy and monastic life that puts gender at the center. Her book Women in Ochre Robes (SUNY Press 2004) focuses on the everyday lives of women initiated into sannyasa – one of several Hindu renunciant traditions. These women walk away from marriage, family ties, wealth, caste, and professional status for a life of celibacy and spiritual discipline. Khandelwal’s research suggests that sexuality and celibacy are mutually constructed and that abstinence should be accounted for in the field of sexuality studies. She co-edited a volume with Sondra Hausner and Ann Grodzins Gold entitled Women’s Renunciation in South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). A South-Asian edition of this book was published with the title Nuns, Yoginis, Saints and Singers (Zubaan 2007). Khandelwal has also studied transnational aspects of Hindu renunciation and published on the topic of foreign swamis who have migrated to India (“Foreign Swamis at Home in India” 2007) as well as cosmopolitanism and spiritual tourism in Rishikesh – yoga capital of the world (“The Cosmopolitan Guru” 2012).

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