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Meera Karunananthan

Assistant Professor

Biography

Conflicts over the control of freshwater supplies have become a defining feature of capitalism in the 21st century. As an engaged researcher, she is committed to theorizing these “hydro-social” conflicts by bringing critical geography and feminist theory into conversation with knowledge produced by grassroots movements at the frontlines.

Meera’s academic work is shaped by many years of experience in environmental and social justice organizing. Building on relationships with feminist, indigenous and environmental justice movements, her current research investigates the processes that produce uneven distribution of water in cities of the global South. As a feminist political ecologist, she is concerned with the ways in which market-based solutions to climate change and drought reproduce power asymmetries and legitimize the ongoing dispossession of historically marginalized groups. Specifically, she examines the racialized, class-based and gendered impacts of privatization, and financialization of urban water systems.

Before joining Ӱԭ, she was the director of the Blue Planet Project, a global water justice organization founded by the Canadian NGO, the Council of Canadians. In this role, she has supported global trans-local organizing aimed at building connections between local water justice struggles through research and popular education strategies.

Her methods of research and analysis are influenced by the work of BIPOC feminists whose study of racial capitalism is foregrounded by the experiences of women living at the intersections of race, gender, colonial and class-based oppression.

2024-2025 courses

Selected publications

Selected non-refereed publications

Published reports

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