🎓 Gurmeet Kaur is a post-doctoral fellow at Iméra for the 2025-26 academic year. Her research project explores how Buddhist beliefs and practices inspire women to protect nature and how this relationship shapes their daily lives and social roles in the face of climate change.
🌿The relationship between nature and human life has always been deep and complex. In particular, the Buddhist tradition views this relationship not only through a spiritual lens but also in social and ecological contexts. Within this tradition, the connection between women, religion, and nature takes on a unique form.
📚 Dr. Gurmeet Kaur is a scholar of Women’s Studies and Buddhist Studies, with a regional focus on the Indian Himalayan belt. She earned her PhD in 2024 from the Department-cum-Centre for Women’s Studies and Development at Panjab University, Chandigarh (Bibliography below).
🔗To learn more about Gurmeet Kaur’s research project, visit her Iméra fellow page here
• Kaur, G. (2021). Tara in Vajrayana Buddhism: A critical content analysis. Feminist Theology, 30(2), 210–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/09667350211055444
• Kaur, G. (2024, July 1). Ladakh: Fighting for a sustainable future. South Asia @ LSE. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2024/07/01/ladakh-fighting-for-a-sustainable-future/
• Kaur, G. (2024, February 26). Addressing OBC exclusion in India’s Women Reservation Bill. LSE Human Rights. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2024/02/26/addressing-obc-exclusion-in-indias-women-reservation-bill/
• Kaur, G. (2024, May 16). Post-colonial reflections on Osho’s controversial ideologies. Religion and Global Society. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2024/05/post-colonial-reflections-on-oshos-controversial-ideologies/
• Kaur, G. (2025, April 9). Resilience in exile: Tibetan Buddhist adaptations in the post-pandemic world. CoronAsur (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore). https://ari.nus.edu.sg/20331-124/
• Kaur, G. (2025). Intersecting nation-building and gender marginalisation: Tibetan women in exile and the role of governance in body politics. Asian Studies Review, 49(4), 818–835. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2025.2501664
Transcript generated by artificial intelligence (Whisper speech recognition model), not yet checked by a human. It may contain errors, particularly in proper nouns, specialised terminology and passages in other languages. Where there is any doubt, the recording prevails.
Video transcript
Click a timestamp to play the video from that point.
0:09 I am Gurmeet. I'm a scholar of women's studies and Buddhist studies with the regional focus on Indian Himalayas. I earned my PhD from Punjab University in 2024 and my work focuses on Tibetan women in exile, specifically their socioeconomic and political situation and their historical perspective. My work is published in journals like Asian Studies Review, Feminist Theology, and with the publishers like Bloomsbury Academic. In the public placing platforms, my work is visible in the academic blogs like London School of Economics and National University of Singapore.
0:46 So across different spaces, I'm very interested in understanding how the Buddhist worldviews and women's lived experience intermingle and create experiential wisdom, which in Buddhism we call as Bhavana Mahipragya. My project focuses on ecological wisdom, spirituality and climate change in Ladakh through women-led development. In essence, I'm very interested and ask the questions on the Buddhist ethics, women's everyday knowledge, particularly with indigenous knowledge system, which is helping to mitigate climate change in the high-risk zones like Himalaya.
1:26 I conducted a qualitative fieldwork with women farmers, with the monastic members, with the village leaders, with NGOs and with the government officials. I'm very interested in the linkages between the Buddhist ethics and the Buddhist philosophical idea of compassion, interdependence and its relevance in today's world to cater the questions of climate change. My project argues that women are not passive recipients of climate policies and the government policies. They are the key knowledge holder who can help us to rethink how we are perceiving the
2:14 world problems today. I am also trying to actually theorize the question of how we as academics are seeing the resilience, the adaptation to climate change in both Western and Eastern worlds. At Emera, from September onwards, the residency has been great for me. One, because of the presence of different scholars, the scholars coming from different disciplines, history, philosophy, sociology, the scholars of migration study, which was part of my PhD as well. So that has helped me to push beyond what I do and what I think. Now I can say that my conceptual framework is more strong than when I write here.
2:56 The essential thing I liked about the EMERA is the presence of arts. The way they are presenting the scientific knowledge in the non-academic formats is really interesting for me because that's what captures your eye when you look at somebody's research. My priority is to consolidate my findings and bring out the monograph on women's ecological knowledge in Ladakh and the role of religion, religious traditions I would say, to mitigate climate changes at the grassroot. In addition to that I will also be bringing a series of articles which deal with feminist
3:34 theory, with environmental humanities and Buddhist studies. Professionally I aim to hold a university position which can help me to use the same rigor of research that I am doing currently along with the innovative teachings. I want to build and design courses for the students which help them to see the Himalayan and Buddhist world views. And at the same time work with the NGOs, local communities and policy makers to ensure that the voices, what we call as a margin, should not be left behind. ¿Qué ¿Qué ¿Qué ¿Qué ¿Qué ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿
4:11 ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿
