Dr Negar Elodie Behzadi is Lecturer in the Social Science of International Development, and co- founder and convenor of the VEM Network. Dr Behzadi is a French/Iranian feminist geographer of environment and development, trained in France and the UK. For several years, she was an environmental and social executive for a multilateral development project in Southeast Asia. In 2012, she graduated with a first-class degree in Environment and Development (MA Geography) at King’s College London. She then carried on her academic training with a DPhil in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford (2018).
Negar’s doctoral research explored the working lives of men, women and children in a context of politico-ecological transformation in post-Soviet Tajikistan. In observing gendered work and resource struggles, Negar’s research built a complex understanding of how gender comes into being in this post-Soviet Muslim context, marked by significant political and environmental shifts. Her work investigated how gender, Muslimness and tradition were reconfigured in the wake of broader politico-ecological transformations and their local impacts through work and resource struggles.
Negar is also an aspiring documentary filmmaker – interested in the connections between visual and embodied approaches to research and social sciences methodologies. She is currently working on a short documentary based on her ethnographic work in Tajikistan, and is also coordinating the Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network at King’s.
Dr Behzadi is working with an artist to create an animated ethnographic portrait based on her research of stigmatised female coal miners in Tajikistan. (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/using-animation-to-raise-awareness-of-issues-of-gender-and-exclusion).