Meenal Shrivastava is Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Political Economy and Global Studies at Athabasca University, Canada. Born in Jaipur, she now lives as an uninvited immigrant settler in the ancestral home of the Wsáneć Peoples in the unceded Coast Salish Territories, or what is known as greater Victoria, BC.
Her academic research explores the complex concept of `globalization’ as a description, a process, as well as an ideology. In particular, she examines the drivers and manifestations of globalization, and their impact on the institutions and practices of democracy, especially in the context of the widening gulf between the peoples and the states. Consequently, her publications, courses, and public lectures cover themes as varied as aspects of democracy, public policy, development studies, global history, women/gender studies, and disciplinary building blocks, connected to the central thread of the political economy of our relentlessly globalizing world. Her research on these political economic processes has so far led to more than one hundred and fifty publications, including three books. Currently, aside from serving on several professional and editorial boards, she has been learning to use creative relational stories as a methodology of research and dissemination to illustrate how individual lives intersect with broad social-political trends, and why it matters.