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Dr Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University. Her work makes substantive contributions to the rapidly emergent field of South Asian Animal Studies through a twin focus on animals in political and urban life in India. It addresses species as an explicit identity category in Indian national politics through the intersections of anthropocentrism, sectarianism, and casteism. Her book Mother Cow, Mother India offers one of the first empirical critiques of India’s cow protectionism discourse and politics from a critical animal studies standpoint. Yamini’s work on urban animals is the first to theorise species as part of populations in urban informal spaces. Her work is published in leading journals including Environment and Planning A, D and E; Urban Geography; Geoforum; Hypatia; and South Asia.

Yamini is the founding Convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network and is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. In 2019, Yamini was awarded Deakin University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Mid-Career Research Excellence. Yamini serves as Special Issues Editor of Urban Geography; Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities; and South Asia Editor for Asian Studies Review. Yamini publishes widely in media on issues related to animal rights, including the Animal Liberation Currents, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Huffington Post and Animal People Forum. She has been interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Brazil, and for documentaries on cow protection politics and animal advocacy in India.

Yamini is Hindu and applies a broadly naturalistic worldview in practice. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@YaminiNarayanan
Yamini at Deakin