Meena Menon

I graduated in English and French (BA, MA), and I completed my PhD on Social Movements in Independent India at the School of History, University of Leeds in April 2024. Before my PhD, I have had a long career in journalism, starting with Bombay magazine in 1984. I have worked with United News of India, The Times of India, Mid-day, Humanscape Magazine and The Hindu which was my last full-time job, till 2015. I am also a freelance journalist and editor. I have been awarded several media fellowships in the course of my career and produced numerous articles and reports on various issues, listed below. My current research focuses on Scheduled Castes or Dalits in social movements and I am conducting a comparative study of the community in two movements in India as part of my post-doctorate research under the LAHRI fellowship. 

Media Research Fellowships

2010 Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) Fellowship which included covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference at Cancun, Mexico. I covered two other UN climate summits in Doha, Qatar and Lima, Peru as part of a fellowship from the Centre for Science and Environment.  

2007 Independent fellowship to study communal polarisation in Mumbai after the communal riots of 1992-93 from SARAI-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). This resulted in the book Riots and after in Mumbai published by Sage in 2012.  

2003 Two-week training programme in development communication in Washington D C and New York by Vital Voices, a global communication network, in collaboration with Georgetown University.  

2001 media fellowship on the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), from the ministry of environment.  

2001 Member of a five-member team from Southern countries to analyse sustainable development in Germany, in view of the Rio plus ten meeting in Johannesburg in 2002. The programme, sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the German government, continued in April 2002. The Foundation published a report titled “Sustainable Germany-A View from the South, Ten years after Rio”, released in June 2002 in Berlin, Johannesburg and other cities.  

1999 Environment journalists’ programme which looked at inter- country water disputes in Nepal, Bangladesh and India.  

1999 Fellowship from the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, to study the watershed management and education guarantee schemes in Madhya Pradesh.  

1996 Media research fellowship from the National Foundation for India, New Delhi. My topic of research was prostitution and trafficking of women. I wrote thirteen articles, many of which were published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine and some were published in a book On the Trail of the Girl Child.  

1996 The Rotary Club of Bombay North fellowship for Environmental Journalism.  

1993 The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, media fellowship. The project involved authoring a detailed report on the water situation in Kutch and the efforts of an NGO in regenerating ground water and helping farmers to become self-reliant. An abstract of the report was published in the magazine “Down to Earth.”  

1993 The Panos Institute, London, Fellowship on the theme “Water.” This helped me travel in and around Maharashtra and study the problems of sugarcane cultivation with relation to drought, apart from new irrigation techniques and watershed management. These reports were published in The Times of India apart from a magazine called “Panoscope,” London.  

1991 International Visitor Programme of the US government. It was a 40- day programme in the USA at the invitation of the US government to study environmental issues.  

Publications

Monograph

‘Social Movements in Independent India: A Comparative History of Inequality and Resistance’. London: Bloomsbury (in preparation).

Journal articles

Mobilisation of social movements and the local state in Independent India.2024. Contemporary South Asia. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2024.2410715 

Riots and After in Mumbai, Revisiting a City in Conflict in 1992-93: First edition, Sage, 2012. New edition, Yoda Press, 2024 <https://www.amazon.in/Riots-After-Mumbai-Revisiting-Conflict/dp/9382579966>

A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India co-authored with Uzramma. Oxford University Press. October 2017 <https://india.oup.com/product/a-frayed-history-9780199474639>

Reporting Pakistan: Penguin Random house. May 2017 <https://penguin.co.in/our-booksnotborders-bookshelf/>  

Organic Cotton: Reinventing the Wheel: Deccan Development Society and Kalpavriksh, 2004.  

The Grass is Greener This Side. The Green Pen, Environment Journalism in India and South Asia, edited by Keya Acharya and Frederick Noronha, Sage 2010.  

All Smoke and No Play. Dharavi, The City Within, edited by Joseph Campana HarperCollins Publishers, India, 2013.  

On the Trail of the Girl Child: co-authored with Sharmila Joshi, Books for Change, 1998.  

Conferences and Presentations

2024

‘Justice, Development and Environment: Communities and Transition in India’, University of Leeds - OP Jindal Global University conference, February 14.  

2023 

‘Understanding social movements in India: The case of the NBA and the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti(PPSS) or the anti-POSCO movements’, Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas(CTARA), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),  February 28.   

‘Mobilisation of social movements in post-colonial India and the local state”,  BASAS conference, University of Leeds, April 6. 

‘Social Movements and the Local State’, South Asia Conference at Madison, as part of the Contemporary Social Issues of South Asia panel, on October 2. 

2022

‘Social movements, leadership and agency’  at the annual British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) conference. I also proposed the panel on social movements and agency, and chaired the panel discussion with five presentations. April 1. 

‘Leadership and social movements’, presentation at the School of History, University of Leeds, May 17.  Another paper,  ‘State and Social Movements’ on Nov 23.  

‘Mobilisation of social movements in post-colonial India and the local state’. Paper for the South Asia Anthropologists’ Group (SAAG) Conference, Edinburgh, September 7. 

‘Social Movements and the Local State’, Paper presented at the Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) Conference Varanasi, India, November  16. 

2021 

‘Displacement and Resistance: A case study of the anti-POSCO movement in Odisha, India,’ Newcastle Post Graduate Forum, March 24. 

'From the Paika rebellion to the Anti- POSCO movement in Odisha, India’, Cambridge Politico Intellectual History Workshop on Twentieth century India,  June 17. 

Teaching

I am currently a mentor with Lumiere Foundation. I have taught global history (as a PGR at the University of Leeds), journalism and media practice at the Xavier Institute of Communication and St Paul’s Institute of Communication Education, Mumbai. 

Qualifications

PhD, (University of Leeds), MA, BA (University of Mumbai)

Professional memberships

BASAS, Bombay Natural History Society, Asiatic Society, Mumbai, Mumbai Press Club