Papers by Carly Ellen Nichols
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2023
Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soi... more Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that may underpin these perceptions of fertilizer harm. This paper works to fill this gap, analyzing qualitative data collected from farmers in two remote eastern Indian districts using an "integrated" political ecology of health (PEH) framework that utilizes two main approaches to examine bodily materiality and health. In particular, the framework looks at the multi-scalar political economies, cultural forms of meaning-making, as well as the visceral, affective ways that respondents come to see synthetic fertilizers as the cause of barren lands, tasteless foods, and weakened bodies. The article then deploys a critical reading of bioscientific literature to interpret respondent narratives and zoom in onto potential bio-social mechanisms that may help illuminate claims of fertilizer harm in new ways. In particular, I present evidence around how phytochemicals-literally chemicals produced by plants-may shift due to chemical fertilizer use in ways that may matter for hunger and health. Yet, not losing sight of the affective ways crops are grown, consumed, and discussed, I also highlight research examining how beliefs and perceptions measurably modify physiological responses to food in positive or adverse ways through the still ill-understood placebo/nocebo effect. The goal of such analysis is not to present a tidy conclusion to questions of fertilizer-health connections but demonstrate how a PEH that remains attentive to power, discourse, and materiality can bring disparate streams of thought together to forge pathways for transdisciplinary research and practice.
Political Geography, Nov 1, 2022
Gender Place and Culture, Mar 22, 2016
Abstract This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North I... more Abstract This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labor and thus less time for food preparation, a notion itself that is productive of anxiety and further compounds poor FNS practices. NGO and government programs implicitly reinscribe these gendered labor burdens through exclusively targeting women, educating them to be ‘better’ housewives and mothers. While simple solutions and an educative approach were the dominant activities, these organizations also constitute the home as a delimiting social space for development and seek to empower women through livelihood diversification and employment activities. While these programs provide women new spaces with which to forge social relations and develop different sets of knowledge outside the home, without a renegotiation of household labor burdens, these novel commitments oftentimes exacerbate women’s existing workloads at home. This analysis suggests that while FNS programs and policies might sometimes lend short-term relief to FNS, the greatest threat to FNS comes from the ways that the home spaces of women and their household work are devalued through development practices. This results in a lack of gendered labor time to adequately prepare food, thereby contradicting the policies’ stated objectives of reducing food insecurity.
Agriculture and Human Values, Oct 27, 2021
Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornl... more Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight, obesity and chronic disease are simultaneously on the rise. Moreover, while volumes of robust research on causes and solutions to malnutrition have been published, and calls for interdisciplinarity are on the rise, researchers taking different epistemological and methodological choices have largely remained disciplinarily siloed. This paper works to open a scholarly conversation between "mainstream" public health nutrition and "critical" nutrition studies. While critical nutrition scholars collectively question aspects of mainstream nutrition approaches, they also chart a different way to approach malnutrition research by focusing on politics, structural conditions, and the diverse ways people make sense of food and malnutrition. In this paper, we highlight the key research agendas and insights within both mainstream and critical nutrition in order to suggest spaces for their potential conversation. We ultimately argue that global public health nutrition interventions might achieve greater success in more equitable ways if they are informed by critical nutrition research. We aim for this intervention to facilitate more substantial crossing of disciplinary boundaries, critical to forging more socially and environmentally just dietary futures in the global South and beyond.
Agriculture and Human Values, Nov 22, 2021
Progress in Human Geography, Aug 13, 2020
Wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications including target detection and trackin... more Wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications including target detection and tracking, environment monitoring, industrial process monitoring, hospital monitoring, and public utility service. A sensor network consists of a large number of sensor nodes and a few sink nodes to collect data from sensor nodes. Sensor nodes and sink nodes form a large scale wireless mesh network in which packets are typically delivered between sensor nodes and sink nodes in a multi-hop manner. Reliable packet routing in wireless sensor networks is crucial, especially when network size is large. This paper presents a reliable routing protocol (RRP) to maximize the reliability of data collection and control command delivery in large scale wireless sensor networks. RRP aims to discover multiple bidirectional routes between a sensor node and a sink node. Sink node initiates route construction with an imaginary node as the destination to guarantee complete routing topology buildup. RRP achieves load balance by sending data packets via the route with lighter workload. RRP can be optimized for lightweight routing. Simulation results show that the proposed RRP routing protocol can realize 100% of packet delivery rate and outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of packet delivery rate, routing packet overhead, and end-to-end packet delay. Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN) This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.
Geoforum, Aug 1, 2015
ABSTRACT Despite rapid economic growth, India has not seen the improvements in food and nutrition... more ABSTRACT Despite rapid economic growth, India has not seen the improvements in food and nutritional security that other developing countries have had. This ''Asian enigma " has generated a wealth of economistic analyses seeking to explain the persistence of poor nutrition, yet few studies have looked at everyday experiences of changing food systems, and how this impacts nutritional practices as well as the processes of subject formation. In this paper, I draw on qualitative research conducted in Uttarakhand, North India and examine how state-led shifts in agricultural production have resulted in changing food consumption practices and diminished perceptions of health. Villagers link this decreased health to increased chemicals in home-produced food, greater dependence on the market for food purchases, and generational changes in dietary preferences. Despite villagers' cognizance of the negative health effects of these practices , they largely view these byproducts of capitalistic development with an air of inevitability. Following Mansfield (2011) this paper contributes to the political ecology of health literature by employing the concept of food as a ''vector of intercorporeality " (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003:449) and bringing this into conversation with a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity. I argue that within shifting landscapes of agriculture production and food consumption, notions of diminished health are indicative of the complex and always incomplete processes of subject formation. I view shifting health perceptions as intimate bodily resistances to agricultural development, and conclude that within agricultural development programs a focus on bodily health and well-being is a fecund platform for further experimental research that seeks to imagine development differently.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Nov 5, 2021
Within the empowerment literature, “freedom of movement” or “mobility” are frequently used as ind... more Within the empowerment literature, “freedom of movement” or “mobility” are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded benefit. This has been especially pronounced as the empowerment agenda's prerogative to collectively transform power structures became co‐opted by a neoliberal focus on fostering responsible financial subjects with entrepreneurial savvy. In this paper, I draw on multi‐year ethnographic research of women's SHG interventions in eastern and central India to critically explore the ways different mobile practices intersect with empowerment goals. I contend it is necessary to examine mobility as more than physical movement and also to analyse it as a meaning‐laden and embodied practice intimately bound up in the neoliberal development agenda. Using this analytic, I find that although newfound mobility is often experienced positively by women, it is far from “free,” and remains embedded in power relations where women continue to engage on unfavourable terms – exemplified in women's inability to leisurely tour/wander. I conclude by reflecting on how empowerment interventions might more productively engage mobility less as a practice of increased economic and political participation and more as a site where women can experiment with new forms of being.
Social Science & Medicine, Sep 1, 2021
Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sec... more Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sectoral roots through re-diversifying agricultural production while integrating women's empowerment and nutrition behavior-change communication components. For these integrated nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, women-led self-help groups have emerged as promising platforms for program delivery. Yet, while well-designed nutrition behavior-change communication has been successfully used in self-help groups, and is central to nutrition-sensitive agriculture, it can take many forms. These vary widely in their theoretical and ethical underpinnings, communication strategies, and theory of change. As nutrition-sensitive agriculture continues to proliferate, it is critical to better understand how women interact with different behavior-change messages and how to engage individuals in ethical, effective ways. This paper analyzes qualitative data collected from a nutrition-sensitive agricultural project in India that used participatory storytelling to generate knowledge and awareness about malnutrition among women. Drawing from data across two sites, the paper analyzes why certain messages generated more discussion among women then others. We find self-help group women were drawn to topics of early marriage and diet diversity because they emotionally connected to them, and felt they were relevant to their lives with high perceived pay-off and actionability. While other topics on gender and health also provoked emotional, lively discussions, the stories were less effective due to their complexity, which were difficult for volunteer facilitators to communicate. We conclude that there is unmet demand among women in rural India for structured spaces to discuss gendered aspects of health and diet, and nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs could benefit from focusing attention here.
Geoforum, Oct 1, 2019
Global health organizations focused on nutrition have developed an intense focus on the first 100... more Global health organizations focused on nutrition have developed an intense focus on the first 1000-days of human life (from the point of conception to age 2) as the time where the right nutrition and care will determine personal health and global economic futures. Based on epidemiology and lab-based bioscience, this has led to a global policy consensus that promotes a set of 'essential interventions' focused on the bodies of mother to ensure productive global futures. Building on scholars arguments that 1000-days consensus is predicated on a logic of anticipatory action, this paper uses the two distinct orientations of the concept of contingency to understand both how this narrative has achieved global prominence, and how it has manifested in particular configurations within India. First, this paper investigates how the 1000-days discourse's ascendance has been achieved through the notion of future life as open-ended contingency. It argues that this specter of future/threat opportunity is then rendered governable through the use of affective practices that quantitatively imagine dystopic global futures of malnourished bodies and stagnant economies, and then makes hope-based appeals to biomedical, nutrition interventions to secure continued economic growth. Second, the paper analyzes qualitative data from Indian policy actors that demonstrates how the 1000-days discourse is refracted across India. I find that Indian responses to such a consensus have been mixed due to the particular socio-political legacies of India as a postcolonial space, and also to a certain level of happenstance and the socio-spatial intermingling of everyday life. This paper's main argument is that while the threat/opportunity of future contingency discursively drives 1000-days, it is simultaneously geographical contingency that complicates the ways it materializes in the particular space of India.
Journal of Rural Studies, Jul 1, 2023
Canadian Geographer, Sep 12, 2016
Recently, India has come under increasing scrutiny for its failure to improve food and nutrition ... more Recently, India has come under increasing scrutiny for its failure to improve food and nutrition security (FNS). Prominent governmental and nongovernmental development strategies addressing FNS include promoting horticultural crops to increase incomes, distributing food, and providing nutritional education. These programs, however, have seen mixed results. Analyzing qualitative data collected in the summer of 2013, this paper examines programs in Uttarakhand, India where hunger has been eradicated, yet malnutrition persists. I suggest that
World Development, Oct 1, 2021
Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering dev... more Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However, there is currently little understanding as to whether SHGs are effective or equitable platforms for delivering health or livelihoods interventions. Social capital is hypothesized as a comparative advantage when utilizing SHGs as development platforms, however the specific mechanisms have yet to be explored. This paper investigates the efficacy and equity of SHGs as platforms for development programs through analyzing 64 interviews and 6 focus group discussions collected from an agriculture and behavior change intervention delivered through SHGs in eastern India. We find that while, theoretically, SHGs are a promising platform for health messaging this is largely dependent on SHG norms of attendance, which itself is closely tied to socioeconomic conditions and social capital. Social capital is important both within SHGs as well as between SHGs and the implementing organization. Sites with more mature SHGs had greater economic security allowing more active participation in the intervention than sites with more poverty and young SHGs. The former sites also had greater norms of trust and reciprocity (social capital) with the implementing organization that led them to accept additional interventions. In the latter sites, SHG members had competing demands on their time and less trust in the implementers, making it difficult to attend both SHG meetings and health sessions. We put forth a materialist understanding of social capital formation, where SHG members must have already received substantive benefit from membership for new activities to be successfully incorporated into their agenda. Further, using SHGs as a nutrition message delivery platform should not detract from individual engagement with more vulnerable members of the community.
Journal of Rural Studies
As COVID-19 caused severe disruptions to global supply chains in March 2020, local and regional f... more As COVID-19 caused severe disruptions to global supply chains in March 2020, local and regional food producers were widely heralded for their flexibility in adapting and 'pivoting' to meet changing market demand amidst public health protocols in ways their behemothic agri-food counterparts could not. While "resilient food systems" have become both an academic buzzword and a practical goal for urban and municipal planners, there is an emergent critical literature that calls for greater attention to questions of power within discourses on resilience. This article contributes to a more critical geography of food system resilience through analyzing the experiences of local food producers and meat processors in the state of Iowa, U.S. during the early pandemic period using a moral economy framework. We argue that while the small-scale, producers who market direct-to-consumer may show resilience in their ability to cope with and adapt to system shocks due to short supply chains and social relations, their uneven experience with socio-emotional and economic 'costs' of resilience merits increased attention from both academics and policymakers. The ethic of 'hustle' within farming, along with the greater social 'embeddedness' of market transactions in local food, invites a certain self-exploitation that is differentially enacted and experienced based on factors such as age, gender, health status, and their level of dependence on farm income. Our conclusions suggest that any policies focused on strengthening local and regional food system resilience need to also focus on the wellbeing of local food producers and promote policies towards dignified and remunerative work. And, you know, pivot was the word of the year, obviously. But I think sometimes people don't realize how much extra time it takes to pivot … So, yeah, it was exhausting. (Interview 11). I mean I'm not being dramatic about it. It was probably my-it was my worst market season as far as how I felt about it. I almost got out of the business because I just didn't want to deal with that anymore. It was getting to be too much. (Interview 2).
Current Developments in Nutrition
Background Women's self-help groups (SHGs) have become one of the largest institutional platf... more Background Women's self-help groups (SHGs) have become one of the largest institutional platforms serving the poor. Nutrition behavior change communication (BCC) interventions delivered through SHGs can improve maternal and child nutrition outcomes. Objectives The objective was to understand the effects of a nutrition BCC intervention delivered through SHGs in rural India on intermediate outcomes and nutrition outcomes. Methods We compared 16 matched blocks where communities were supported to form SHGs and improve livelihoods; 8 blocks received a 3-y nutrition intensive (NI) intervention with nutrition BCC, and agriculture- and rights-based information, facilitated by a trained female volunteer; another 8 blocks received standard activities (STD) to support savings/livelihoods. Repeated cross-sectional surveys of mother-child pairs were conducted in 2017–2018 (n = 1609 pairs) and 2019–2020 (n = 1841 pairs). We matched treatment groups over time and applied difference-in-differen...
The University of Arizona., 2019
Recently, the issue of nutrition has ascended the development agenda with a focus on the first 1,... more Recently, the issue of nutrition has ascended the development agenda with a focus on the first 1,000 days of life (the point of conception to age two) as a critical time for intervention so as to secure not just the health of the individual but also optimal global economic futures. Promulgated by high-profile issues of the medical journal The Lancet, development agencies have taken to addressing what has been coded as nutrition-specific (individual, bio-medical) and nutrition-sensitive (i.e. structural, socio-economic) solutions. My dissertation asks: how has The Lancet- enshrined narratives around nutrition come to matter in the context of India. I answer this question through a suite of qualitative methods that includes policy interviews, textual analysis, and a 12-month ethnographic study of a particular nutrition-agriculture program that was carried out in two districts of central and eastern India. I contextualize this data in chapter two through providing historical context that details the long-held tensions in colonial and post-colonial state spaces between commitments to rational, scientific state planning and strong socialist and egalitarian imperatives. The first paper (appendix A) examines the policy narratives of this new nutrition agenda, and traces how they come to circulate amongst Indian policy actors. I analyze the construction and circulation of the ‘1,000-day’ discourse using the concept of contingency, both as a way to signal radical open-ended (yet foreclosed) futurity and as everyday geographic difference and emergent life. This paper's main argument is that while the threat/opportunity of future contingency drives 1,000-days, it is simultaneously geographical contingency that complicates the ways it materializes in the particular space of India. The second paper (appendix B) examines the spatialities of responsibility within a series of body-mass index (BMI) camps that were carried out across rural India as a key health promotion practice to alert women of their health status. I find that the BMI is not an a priori technology of neoliberal governmentality, but can be a powerful means to highlight social marginalization and create new communities of care. I argue that the spaces of BMI deployment are tightly linked to the types of responsibility and care it produces, and that this has clear implication for the production of more ethical forms of health promotion. The third paper (appendix C) takes body-rice relations as its focal point and develops an integrated political ecology of health framework to analyze the multifaceted complexities of the way people interact with their principal crop rice and how it inflects both subject formation and health. This paper reviews how social science tends to analyze dietary practice within the realms of political economic structure, social constructionism, and more recently in the visceral, sensing body. I argue that integrating socio-ecologies/biologies is critical to better understand rice-human interactions and their health implications. To this end, I develop an integrated PEH framework that takes structure, social constructionism, and both dominant views of materiality—the affective/sensorial and the socio-biological-- and holds them in analytical tension. My primary aim in advancing an integrated PEH framework is, thus, to offer a way to allow for biological analysis within dietary health, without becoming deterministic.Release after 08/08/202
Agriculture and Human Values, 2021
Social Science & Medicine, 2020
The body mass index (BMI), which measures body mass divided by height squared (kg/m²), has become... more The body mass index (BMI), which measures body mass divided by height squared (kg/m²), has become a popular technology for quickly measuring and assessing individuals' health and disease risk. However, the BMI has also been widely criticized by health professionals who argue that it's a poor measure of health. Feminist scholars are also critical, arguing BMI is a technology of neoliberal health promotion that pathologizes body size, and produces responsibilized subjects invested in maintaining "proper" weights, while often ignoring the social and environmental conditions that result in differently sized bodies. In this paper, I look at a series of BMI "camps" held across rural North India in 2017 and put forth two central arguments. First, BMI is not an a priori technology of neoliberal governmentality, but can be also be a means to highlight social marginalization and create relations of care. I find the spaces of BMI deployment are tightly linked to the types of responsibility and care it produces. Second, while the intended goal of these BMI camps is to propel people, mostly women, to change their behavior to be more healthful, this behavior change was often stymied by the everyday business of surviving in India's current political economic climate. Despite that women were unable to implement much of the nutrition advice (and sometimes reported additional stress due to attendance at such camps), women continued to attend health-related camps. This paper draws on the notion of cruel optimism, which argues that the objects of our attachments, such as ideas of "the good life" can be self-detrimental, as a way to unpack the paradox of women who continue to show up for health camps despite not taking anyway many useful skill and sometimes causing them anxiety.
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Papers by Carly Ellen Nichols