Mira Käkönen
ARC DECRA Fellow
Qualifications
D.Soc.Sc. (2021, Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki) M.Soc.Sc. (2012, Sociology, University of Helsinki) B.Soc.Sc. (2009, Sociology, University of Helsinki)
Mira Käkönen is a scholar of political ecology and an ARC DECRA Fellow in the Resources, Environment & Development Group. Before joining the ANU she had just started as a lecturer in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. Over the past 15 years she has worked in various research projects on the politics of environment and development, with particular focus on how water resources are made and governed in the Mekong Region, Southeast Asia. Her DECRA project ‘Volatile Rivers and the Infrastructure Politics in the Mekong Region’ explores entanglements of rivers, infrastructure, and power relations as well as how these are increasingly shaped by a globalizing China and climate change. She is also a member of a Kone Foundation funded research project ‘Repair and responsibility in ruined environments of the global South’ that studies the new politics of restoration and the ways in which people living at the extractive frontlines reimagine and recraft their livelihoods.
Research interests
- Political ecology
- Resource-making and resource politics
- Infrastructure politics and infrastructural violence
- Hydrosocial relations, rivers and deltas
- Large hydropower dams
- Climate change adaptation, mitigation, and vulnerability
- Intersections of water and climate governance
- Enclaved spaces of governing
- Politics of knowledge
- Green economy and carbon markets
- Globalising China
- Mainland Southeast Asia (esp. Cambodia and Laos), Mekong River Basin
Teaching
EMDV8102/EMDV9102 - Research Methods for Environmental Management and Development - Sem 1 2024
