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In this podcast, Burkle Center Intern Kelli Calloway interviews Nandini Gunewardena (bio below). This is the first of a series of career interviews with UCLA faculty and LA community members aimed at providing UCLA students advice about entering the job market and choosing a career focus.
(Bio:) Nandini Gunewardena is an Economic Anthropologist (Ph.D earned from UCLA), with over 14 years of experience as a development practitioner, and 10 years of teaching experience in development studies, applied anthropology, and gender. Her work in international development spans community-based research, project design, implementation and evaluation, and policy reform, with sectoral expertise particularly on conceptualizing and alleviating poverty, including the feminization of poverty, as well as health and nutrition, micro-credit, water and sanitation, and agriculture and natural resource management. Her regional specialization is South Asia, with comparative analysis of Southeast Asia, and recent research on gender in the Middle East and North Africa region. She has worked with a number of bi- and multi-lateral agencies, including Care International, CIDA, DANIDA, SIDA, USAID, and the World Bank. She is the author of two recent publications, The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Economic and Social Marginalities (2007, SAR Press), and Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Assistance (2008 Rowman & Littlefield), in addition to several recent journal articles. Her ongoing research focuses on the widening disparities in globalization, women in the current global crisis, and suicide as a response to economic stressors. She was nominated for UCLA's Teaching excellence award in 2004, won a Fulbright scholarship in1986 for her dissertation research, and was one of four students in 1985 to be awarded Outstanding Graduate Student at UCLA.