Dr. Manisha Desai joined Stony Brook University in Fall 2023 as the Executive Director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power. She is jointly appointed in WGSS and Sociology, and we could not be happier to welcome her into our department. In her short time here, Dr. Desai been a steadfast and fierce advocate for climate justice, artistic freedom, transnational feminisms, and student protest movements. 

Dr. Manisha Desai’s research delves into transnational feminism, women’s human rights, gender and globalization, and contemporary Indian society to theorize with marginalized communities in their pursuit of social justice. Methodologically, her work investigates power dynamics in knowledge production and advocates for co-produced knowledge to transform unequal social relations. She employs a critical feminist lens that seeks to decolonize knowledge production and contribute to social justice even as it problematizes those efforts.

Currently, Dr. Desai is engaged in research on women’s rights, land rights, and climate justice in India and the Northeastern United States. Her work aims to understand how Dalit women farmers in India and women farmers of color in the United States bring together issues of land rights, and women’s economic, social, and political rights to address climate change. She is also involved in the Global Research and Action Network on the Eco-Social Contract at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Here, she collaborates with academics, community members, and policymakers from various countries to promote climate justice.

Additionally, Dr. Desai is working on reframing diversity, equity, and inclusion as justice, equity, and transformation to ensure that issues of systemic racism and inequalities are addressed structurally. Committed to decolonizing knowledge production and academia, she serves on the Steering Committee of the Federation of Feminist Journal Editors. The Federation aims to establish a feminist knowledge commons outside commercial publishing to facilitate the free circulation of feminist knowledge across borders and language barriers.

We asked Dr. Desai to tell us more about her social justice work, how this connects to her research and teaching, and the role art and literature play in her life!

Tell us about the Center for Changing Systems of Power.

The Center for Changing Systems of Power is a collaborative space for furthering epistemic, aesthetic, and social justice locally and globally.

Epistemically, we are committed to co-producing knowledge with those within and outside the academy to develop solidarities of epistemologies that will not only illuminate interlocking relationships of socio-economic and political inequalities but also how communities locally and globally are challenging those systems of power. Currently, our affiliates are focused on ecological, health, and carceral systems that are in urgent need of transformation.

Aesthetically, through our artivist in residence program, we seek to showcase practices and visions of art that draw upon dynamic local and global traditions and practices that envision a better world for us all.

Socially, the Center is committed to promoting justice, both within and beyond the academy, in communities and causes on Long Island, greater New York, and globally.

We bring together academics, community groups, artists, advocates, and public policy makers by sponsoring dialogues and debate as well as teach-ins over issues of importance within and outside SBU.

How does your work with CCSP connect to your feminist research and teaching?

The Centers three lenses of epistemic, aesthetic and social justice emerge directly from my transnational feminist research and teaching. As a feminist scholar activist and teacher, I’ve always been attentive to knowledge produced outside the academy and incorporated activist and artistic reflections in my research and teaching.

Similarly, collaboration with colleagues across disciplines has informed my writing and teaching and that is also how the Center functions.

Ensuring that the Center’s programming is inclusive of students and staff and community members is another way that my feminist sensibilities inform the work of the Center.

What is the most important thing for researchers to keep in mind when collaborating with communities outside academia?

This question reminds me of the by now classic book Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari that critiqued the ways in which participation was becoming mandated in the development field.

Something similar seems to be happening with community engagement as everyone from federal funding agencies to universities want researchers to collaborate with communities outside academia.

Given this, it’s crucial to be honest about our motivations, i.e., why do we seek collaboration, who benefits, before thinking about how we work together.

What was your favorite class as an undergrad?

I was a microbiology major and chemistry minor in a very structured curriculum with little freedom so can’t say that I had a favorite. But I went to a Jesuit college and us non-Catholics had to take a course called Moral Science. As a 16-yr old starting college it intrigued me that ethical issues were framed as a science for the heathens. So, were the Bible and science being seen as equivalent? I enjoyed such questions and conversations in that class though not sure what our Jesuit priest thought of that.

What is the best novel you’ve read recently?

Not sure about the best, but I recently read a book of short stories called What we Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri that stayed with me for a long time. The narrator of each story is an animal, a donkey, vultures, the mythical Manticore of the title, and each is set in a different location from Gaza to India to the US northern plains. Each is a haunting tale of inter-species relationships and life on earth that is very of our time and yet also timeless.

Given my own work on eco-social justice and thinking of more than human rights and earth jurisprudence it spoke to me in ways that it might not have had I read it at another time.

What is your favorite museum?

Don’t have a favorite but among the ones I go to and enjoy on a regular basis is a little gem called the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. New Britain is one of those small New England industrial towns that have lost their manufacturing base with few material remnants of a once vibrant community, this museum being one of them. As the oldest museum featuring American art, it showcases an amazing array of artists. That’s where I first saw Kara Walker’s cut-out paintings and recently saw the Brazilian American artist Vik Muniz who assembles large scale collages with everyday materials and then photographs them.

Early bird or night owl?

Definitely an early bird.