Associate Professor Tanya Jakimow is an anthropologist working in India and Indonesia. She is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, working on a project examining women’s political labour and pathways to politics in Medan, Indonesia, and Dehradun, India. She collaborates with scholars and practitioners in Indonesia, India and Australia, aiming to make theoretical contributions to the anthropology of politics (in particular gender and politics) and to enhance understandings about the enduring problem of women’s political under-representation.

The central focus of Tanya’s work is the micro-politics of local level development. Her current book Susceptibility in Development: Micro-politics of urban development in India and Indonesia, (in-press, release date July 2020, Oxford University Press ‘Critical Frontiers of Development Studies’ series) brings affect theory into conversation with theories of power in Development Studies to propose a new approach to understanding power configurations in local level development. It draws upon ethnographic research with volunteers in a community-driven development program in Medan, Indonesia, and with women Municipal Councillors in Dehra Dun, India, and was funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA Award.

As a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO (2010-2012), Tanya worked on interdisciplinary research projects examining rural livelihoods in the context of climate variability. Her second monograph, Decentring Development: Understanding Change in Agrarian Societies (2015, Palgrave MacMillan, Anthropology, Change and Development series) centres the political economy of selfhood in analysis of rural livelihoods and agrarian transformation, drawing upon research conducted in Telangana, India, and Central Lombok, Indonesia. It also outlines an approach to the anthropology for development which favours curiosity and a focus on broader processes of change over answering pre-defined research questions.

Her first monograph, Peddlers of Information: Indian NGOs in the Information Age (2012, Kumarian Press), examined the knowledge making practices of small local NGOs in Uttarakhand, India, and is based on her PhD on the topic. Her journal articles on these topics (among others) span the fields/disciplines of Development Studies, Anthropology and Asian Studies.

Tanya Jakimow is founding member and current President of the Development Studies Association of Australia. She is also secretary of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia.