Fellow, Forests, Governance and Livelihoods
Saloni seeks to advance global sustainability efforts by bridging academic insight with grounded practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of conservation, culture, and community well-being, underpinned by a strong commitment to justice and equity.
Research interests: human-wildlife interactions, multispecies relationships and more-than-human agency, pastoralism and rangeland conservation, environmental justice with a focus on gender and caste politics, ‘meta’ research on conservation.
Saloni teaches and coordinates several core and elective courses. She also actively mentors MSc and PhD students.
Number of MSc students supervising/supervised: 8
Number of PhD students: 1
Conservation Issues and Concerns (Core course for MSc Students, 1st Semester)
Co-designed and co-taught with Sharadchandra Lele and Siddhartha Krishnan
Course coordinator in 2024
The course investigates the history, definition, scope, values and ethics underpinning that term, explores its relationship with other environmental concerns, the relationship of environmentalism with other societal goals, and the challenges of effective environmental conservation in democratic societies. At the end of the course, students should be able to describe the different cultural conceptions of what is to be conserved and why, and coherently articulate the challenges to effective and ethical conservation in a democracy.
Sociology (Core course for MSc and PhD students, 1st Semester)
Co-designed and co-taught with Siddhartha Krishnan (with contributions from Kiran Asher)
Course coordinator in 2023
The course trains students to use the sociological imagination to locate their thoughts and actions related to environment and development in the wider political, economic and cultural structures, and those of other environmental stakeholders, in general. In doing so, students get to discuss the stratified nature of traditional (Indian) society, its encounter with modernity, and how class, caste and gender locations condition experience of environmental goods and bads.
Human-Wildlife Interactions in a Rapidly Changing World (Elective for MSc students, 3rd Semester)
Co-designed and co-taught with Asmita Sengupta (with contributions from several Faculty)
The course introduces students to human-wildlife interactions in its many forms and the various facets thereof. Drawing from the natural and the social sciences – both in terms of theory and practice, and through case studies and debates, the course will examine how human-wildlife interactions are shaped across different cultures, contexts and intersectionalities. It will enable students to assess the implications of different kinds of interactions for human lives, animal lives and the ecosystems that we are a part of.
Current engagements
Past engagements