Associate ProfessorYamini Narayanan

A/Prof. Yamini Narayanan is an ARC Future Fellow and Deputy Director, Partnerships, Impact & Engagement at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Yamini's research intersects animal, political and environmental geography, multispecies ethnography, South Asian studies, animal labour, and animals and geopolitics.

Yamini's book Mother Cow, Mother India (2023, Stanford/Navayana) won the Mid Career Researcher Book Prize 2024 from the Asian Studies Association of Australia; President's Book Prize 2024 from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia; and was shortlisted in the Non-Fiction catetory for the Crossword Book Award 2024, one of India's most prestigious national literary honours.

Yamini is currently researching animals in coercive labour in India’s brick kilns, exploring an anti-anthropocentric politics of poverty and development. Yamini’s Future Fellowship project “Animals and geopolitics in South Asian Borderlands” examines animal-state relations in South Asia, and considers how animals shape, subvert and are impacted by geopolitics. 

Yamini's research is supported by three Australian Research Council grants, including the DECRA Fellowship. In 2019, she was awarded Deakin University's Vice Chancellor's Award for Mid-Career Research Excellence. Yamini is the founding Convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network, and is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, an honour that is conferred through nomination or invitation only. 

Yamini serves as Special Issues Editor of Urban Geography, and Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities. 

Yamini is exclusively interested in PhD inquiries that pertain to one or more of the specified research interests.