Prof Tanya Jakimow

Professor Tanya Jakimow is an anthropologist working on questions of gender equity in politics, development and urban futures. She works in India, Indonesia and Australia, deploying comparative ethnographic approaches to advance theory and practice. While grounded in the theories and methods of anthropology, her research makes interventions across fields, including development studies, gender studies, political science, and Asian studies. Tanya engages stakeholders to translate her research into real-world impact.

Tanya’s current Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2020-2025) project deploys an innovative lens of political labour and recognition to shed new light on enduring questions of women’s political underrepresentation. The manuscript (under preparation) draws upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Dehradun in India, Medan in Indonesia, and NSW in Australia to reconsider key questions in gender and politics from an anthropological perspective.

Tanya is also lead CI for a current ARC Discovery project (2020-2025) on a ‘City from Scratch’, Mahindra World City Chennai in, India. The project centres women’s experiences of life, living and livelihood in MWCC to consider the gendered outcomes of experiments in urban futures, and to map out alternative feminist urban imaginaries.

Professor Jakimow has led three additional projects, now completed. She led an international multi-institutional collaboration examining women’s broken pathways to politics in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, for a project funded by the DFAT Development Leadership Program (2020-2022). In 2013 she was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) for a project on the micro-politics of urban community development in India and Indonesia. As a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO (2010-2012), Tanya led an ACIAR funded variation examining rural livelihoods in the context of climate variability in Telangana India, with additional comparative research in Central Lombok Indonesia.

Tanya has published three sole-authored monographs: Susceptibility in Development: Micro-politics of urban development in India and Indonesia (2020) Oxford University Press, Decentring Development: Understanding Change in Agrarian Societies (2015), Palgrave MacMillan, Anthropology, Change and Development series, and Peddlers of Information: Indian NGOs in the Information Age (2012) Kumarian Press. She is lead editor of Gender and Politics Reimagined: Centring Oceanic and Asian lenses, (ANU Press, forthcoming) and sole editor of Affect, Emotions and Power in Development Studies Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2024). She has published over 60 journal articles in anthropology, political science, development studies, gender studies, Asian studies, urban studies and research methodologies.

Professor Jakimow is a current member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2024-current). She was a co-founder and inaugural President of the Development Studies Association of Australia (2018-2020), former secretary of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, and external member for the CSIRO Human Research Ethics Committee. She has been the academic convenor of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access committee for the School of Culture, History and Languages (2023-2025).  

Gender and politics; party politics and political labour; anthropology of development; affect, emotions and power; comparative ethnography; community development; personhood in development contexts; agrarian political economy and change; livelihoods; non-government organisations.