Kuntala has investigated the length and breadth of community issues in natural resource management, making core contributions in understanding the intricate complexities at different geographical scales of women’s roles and interests, and making visible gender and community livelihoods in natural resource management. She has published widely on the areas of mining and gender, on engendering community development processes in mining, and on informal mining (also known as artisanal and small-scale mining or ASM). Broadly, she has contributed to bringing the livelihoods of the resource-dependent poor to the forefront of natural resource studies from a social science perspective. Following her research on critical water resource studies and the ‘ungovernable chars’ (river islands) in Bengal delta, she is now exploring, with an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, ‘Farmers of the Future’, the feminisation of agriculture as a result of male outmigration, and its consequences for gender relations in rural India.

Dr Itishree Pattnaik is working as an Assistant Professor at Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR) since March 2010. Prior joining GIDR, she was working as a Visiting Fellow (July 2009 to February 2010) at Research Unit for Livelihoods and Natural Resources (RULNR), Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad. During that period she has worked on a project titled ‘Constraints in Agricultural Growth in the Dryland area of Odisha’. Dr Pattnaik has a Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Hyderabad. The topic of her doctoral thesis was ‘Comparative Performance of Agricultural Sector in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa’.

Dr Pattnaik has been awarded the Post-Doctoral fellowship by Food Security Centre (FSC), University of Hohenheim, Germany. During the fellowship period, she worked on various issues related to Status of Food Security in India.

Her major areas of interest include agriculture and sustainable development, inter-state disparities in growth performance and food security. She has published in various referred academic journals like Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Political Weekly, Artha Vijnana. She has presented her academic work at various national and international seminar and conferences.

• GEOS 1001 (Earth, Environment and Society) http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/units_of_study/us_junior.shtml
• GEOS 2123 (The Geography of Cities and Regions) http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/units_of_study/us_geos2123.shtml
• GEOS 3254 (Global Development and Livelihoods) http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/units_of_study/us_geos3514.shtml
• GEOS 3333 (Geographical Concepts, Skills and Methods) http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/units_of_study/us_geos3333.shtml

Over the decade to 2013, Bill supervised 23 Honours students and five PhD students.

• Migration
• Applied Sociology, Program Evaluation And Social Impact Assessment
• International Relations
• Social And Cultural Anthropology
• Economic Development Policy
• Social Policy
• Gender Specific Studies
• Economic Development And Growth
• Political Science
• Studies Of Asian Society
• Anthropology Of Development

• Environmental Sociology
• Environment Policy
• Rural Sociology
• Applied Sociology, Program Evaluation And Social Impact Assessment