Alexa Russo
Graduate Student Fellowship | 2024–2025 Academic Year
Imagining Agrarian Futures: Sustainable Agriculture, Cooperatives, and Gender in India
To create a sustainable agrarian future, many in and beyond India seek a transition to sustainable agriculture with cooperatives as a key structure of implementation and women as pivotal agents of change. This research analyzes how sustainable agriculture cooperatives are produced socially – through different visions and aspirations, collective histories, labor practices, and gendered relations and ideals – within specific development initiatives and across policy networks. This project is an ethnographic study of an all-women cooperative working in sustainable agriculture in Madhya Pradesh, India, as well as policy networks working across sustainable agriculture, cooperative, and women’s empowerment programs and movements.
Alexa Russo, Department of Anthropology
Alexa Russo is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology department at Stanford University and currently holds a Steven and Debi Wisch Fellowship in South Asian Studies. Alexa conducted her fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh on a Fulbright Student Fellowship, with support from the Stanford King Center. Prior to Stanford, Alexa received an MSc in Gender (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017 and a BA in Economics and Religion (with honors) from Amherst College in 2012.