Shoaib submitted his PhD dissertation in Human Ecology at Ambedkar University Delhi. His PhD dissertation States of Science: Apple and Agriculture Extension in the Western Himalayas questions the widespread assumption in postcolonial agricultural extension where nature and science are often taken at hand, for granted as backgrounds for developmental interventions. By using aesthetics as a vantage point to examine the multifaceted relationships between apple trees, growers, bees, scientists, activists, soils, and bureaucrats, the work shows how science, society, the material world, and politics are interwoven in ways that sometimes reproduce but also reconfigure existing social-natural worlds. Shoaib has an MA in Development Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi, and a BA (Hons.) in Economics from the University of Delhi.
At SIAS, Shoaib is a part of the team of researchers who seek to produce a better understanding of the events and mechanisms through which forestry has evolved as a science and practice in the Himalayas. Through multi-sited fieldwork in Nepal and Himachal Pradesh (India) he plans to map the conjuncture of past plantations, failures, participatory approaches, and global warming inflexions as they become part of multiple articulations on forests and forestry. His work seeks to produce a grounded understanding of how scientists, bureaucrats, activists, and rural communities in the Himalayas have come to view forests, and meaningful interventions therein. What conditions shape their work?
Shoaib’s broad academic interests lie at the confluence of an emerging multi-disciplinary conversation on the aesthetics of nature, as they get co-produced in art, architecture, science, policy, and technology worlds.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Brown, T., & Ali, S. S. (2022). Transgressive capabilities: Skill development and social disruption in rural India. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(8), 2452-2468.
Fischer, H. W., & Ali, S. S. (2019). Reshaping the public domain: Decentralization, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and trajectories of local democracy in rural India. World Development, 120, 147-158.
Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016, February). The crowd is a collaborative network. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 134-147)
Gupta, D., Fischer, H., Shrestha, S., Ali, S. S., Chhatre, A., Devkota, K., … & Rana, P. (2021). Dark and bright spots in the shadow of the pandemic: Rural livelihoods, social vulnerability, and local governance in India and Nepal. World Development, 141, 105370.
Negi, R., Thakur, K., & Ali, S. S. (2016). Contoured urbanism: People, property and infrastructures in the Indian Himalayas. Urbanisation, 1(2), 134-148.
Nichols, C. E., Jalali, F., Ali, S. S., Gupta, D., Shrestha, S., & Fischer, H. (2020). The gendered impacts of COVID-19 amid Agrarian distress: Opportunities for comprehensive policy response in Agrarian South Asia. Politics & Gender, 16(4), 1142-1149.
