Kirit Patel

Biography

Dr. Kirit Patel began teaching International Development Studies at Menno Simons in Fall 2007. As an academic, policy analyst, and development professional, Dr. Patel’s teaching and research strive to seek a balance between theory and practice. Dr Patel’s doctoral research examined how indigenous communities in Western India manage their crop biodiversity under a neoliberal policy environment that hastens change in the biophysical properties of farms and brings about fundamental shifts in sociocultural practices and livelihood options. It included comparative ethnographic work on indigenous and non-indigenous ethnic groups and computation of quantitative spatial indices of diversity using field-level GIS mapping. Dr. Patel’s innovative research won the Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship―an international scholarship awarded annually to two scholars worldwide by Bioversity International. He was the first social sciences researcher to receive this scholarship since its inception in 1989. Dr. Patel’s thesis was also awarded second prize in the PhD Dissertation Competition (2007-08) of the Canadian Association of South Asia (CASA).

Research Interest

The primary focus of Dr Patel’s current research has been sociocultural and ecological impacts of agrarian and climate change on small-scale agriculture and indigenous communities in the Global South. It includes loss of agricultural biodiversity and associated indigenous knowledge, change in food consumption and its consequences on nutrition security, rural-urban migration for seeking livelihood, and participatory technology development to promote cultivation and consumption of climate change-resilient indigenous crops, such as small millets. Recently, his work has been extended to examining the impacts of urban middle-class-led environmentalism on the poor and governance of common property resources in the Global South.