Prof. Priya Kurian (PhD; MRSNZ) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans the areas of environmental politics, gender and ethnicity, media and communication, and critical public policy. She is author/co-author or co-editor of seven books and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles. Her most recent co-authored book (with Prof. Debashish Munshi), Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented (2021) won the International Communication Association (ICA) PR Division's 'Outstanding Scholarly Book Award' in 2022. She is also author of Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Bank’s Environmental Policies (2019/2000) and co-editor of Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture, and Development (2003/2005; 2016), Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice (2019), On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (2009), and International Organizations and Environmental Policy (1995).
One of the major focal points of Professor Kurian’s research lies at the intersections of sustainability and citizenship. She is currently working on a project entitled ‘He Rau Ringa: Engaging Ethnic Communities in a Tiriti o Waitangi-centred Framework of Sustainable Citizenship’ (with Profs. Munshi and Sandy Morrison) funded by a Marsden Grant of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Other significant projects she has co-led include a Marsden Grant-funded project on ‘Sustainable Citizenship’; two New Zealand National Science Challenge projects, one on ‘Centring Culture in Public Engagement on Climate Change Adaptation’, and another on ‘Participatory Processes for Marine Ecosystem Restoration’; and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for organising an international symposium on ‘Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice’.
Alongside her work on sustainable citizenship and public engagement, Professor Kurian is also currently involved in research on another Marsden-funded project on Ethnic Women in Politics (with Assoc. Prof. Rachel Simon-Kumar), and a NZ Ministry of Business, Industry, and Employment (MBIE) grant-funded project mapping similarities and differences between Māori and non-Māori in engaging with gene-editing technologies (with colleagues at the Te Kotahi Research Institute and Plant and Food Research).
Prof. Kurian is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a co-founder and current trustee of Shama Ethnic Women’s Trust, which provides social work support and programmes for ethnic minority women and their families, including prevention of family and sexual violence. She is also a member of the Waikato Intercultural Fund Committee of the Momentum Waikato foundation.