Dr Nithya Natarajan is a Senior Lecturer in International Development. Her work explores agrarian change in India and Cambodia. She has specifically explored issues of climate adaptation, livelihood diversification, precarious labour, gender and social reproduction, and debt.  

Nithya completed her ESRC-funded PhD at SOAS, University of London, where she explored water scarcity and livelihood diversification among tobacco farmers in northern Tamil Nadu, India. The focus on livelihood and climate and environmental change has remained throughout her subsequent work.

For almost a decade, Nithya has focused on how expanding microfinance has complicated social reproduction and livelihood diversification for rural households in South India and Cambodia.

Her work as a post-doctoral researcher at Royal Holloway on the ESRC-DfID-funded ‘Blood Bricks’ project (PI Prof Katherine Brickell) focused on how indebtedness led to debt bondage on Cambodian brick kilns. The project was awarded the Times Higher Education Research project of the year award. Nithya was subsequently Co-I of the GCRF-funded ‘Depleted by Debt’ project which explored links between nutrition and over-indebtedness in rural Cambodia and South India during the Covid-19 pandemic and after.  

Nithya’s more recent work centres climate adaptation. She was recently awarded an ERC Synergy grant as Co-PI for ‘AdaptAIR’ which explores climate adaptation in the Himalayas in regions affected by declining glaciers and snow melt. Nithya is also starting to explore climate adaptation among UK regenerative farmers.  

Nithya’s work is published across geography and development journals. Her research has been published in the Guardian, Al Jazeera and ABC Australia, and she has featured on BBC World Service.

Nithya is also a committed teacher and lecturer. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has obtained internal funding for research on climate anxiety among her own students, and to explore the contours of AI use among UG and PGT students. Nithya teaches on climate and development. She is committed to widening participation for students from all backgrounds in UK higher education.  

Research

• Agrarian change
• Climate and environmental change
• Rural-urban livelihood transition
• Gender and social reproduction
• Changing state dynamics
• Labour relations and precarity
• India and Cambodia

Nithya's research focuses on two areas:

1) Agrarian change – rural livelihood diversification, precarious labour, debt, gender and social reproduction, shifting production patterns.

2) Rural climate adaptation – adaptation technologies in agriculture, adaptation policy, microfinance as adaptation, adaptation and changing labour relations.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4YYD0004 Social and Political Analysis of Emerging Economies (Co-Convenor)

Postgraduate

• 7YYD N037 Climate, Environment and Uneven Development (Convenor)
• 7YYDN056 Feast and Famines: Power and Struggle in the Global Food System

PhD supervision

Nithya would be happy to supervise students in any of the following areas:

• Agrarian change, farming and rural labour
• Precarity, debt-bondage and rural-urban labour migration
• Debt and livelihoods
• Social reproduction in rural households

 Further details

See Nithya's research profile