Renu Pariyadath

My research and teaching are driven by an insatiable curiosity about how we can build community across difference. My scholarship focuses on how communities understand and redefine concepts such as “home,” “development,” “sustainability”, and “belonging”. My work has taken me into communities navigating some of the world's most pressing environmental and social justice challenges, most notably, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India. The survivors' ongoing struggle for accountability shapes my understanding of how communication can both amplify and silence marginalized voices. 

My research sits at the intersection of transnational feminism, environmental communication, and critical intercultural communication. I’ve explored how communication can help people move beyond stereotypes and connect across cultural difference, and examined pedagogical strategies for bridging the global and the local in classroom settings. I have written about the transformative potential of questioning spaces that we find comfortable and call home. 

My current work challenges damage-centered approaches to survivor research, exploring methodologies that center Bhopali voices on their own terms. I have also been exploring how higher education can build more inclusive spaces for neurodivergent students, faculty, and staff. 

In my Principles of Oral Communication course, students and I will examine how neuronormative communication is constructed and reinforced in public speaking classrooms. Our class will collaborate with speaking and non-speaking neurodivergent individuals to question and dismantle popular constructions of the normative speaker and communicator. 

Before joining Davidson, I was an Associate Professor, the Director of Neurodiversity, and Affiliate Faculty Member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at University of South Carolina Upstate. I worked as a financial journalist and editor in India and the Middle East before my academic career.