Priya Kurian is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. Her research, underpinned by a focus on social and environmental justice, equity and inclusion, is interdisciplinary and spans the areas of environmental politics, gender and ethnicity, media and communication, and critical public policy.

One of the major focal points of Professor Kurian’s research lies at the intersections of sustainability and citizenship. She is currently working on a project entitled He Rau Ringa: Engaging Ethnic Communities in a Tiriti o Waitangi-centred Framework of Sustainable Citizenship (with Profs. Debashish Munshi and Sandy Morrison) funded by a Marsden grant of the Royal Society of New Zealand (2024-2027). Earlier, she had co-led a project on Sustainable Citizenship: Transforming Public Engagement on New and Emerging Technologies, also funded by a Marsden Grant (2010-2014). Other significant projects she has co-led include a National Science Challenge (Deep South Challenge) project on Centring Culture in Public Engagement on Climate Change Adaptation: Re-shaping the Future of Risk Management in New Zealand (2017-19) as well as a National Science Challenge (Sustainable Seas) project on Participatory Processes for Marine Ecosystem Restoration (2016-18). She also received (with three colleagues in New Zealand and the USA) a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for organising an international symposium on Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice in 2015, which led to a book with the same title in 2019.

Alongside her work on sustainable citizenship, Professor Kurian is also currently collaborating with Assoc. Professor Rachel Simon-Kumar (University of Auckland) on research on Ethnic Women in Politics, funded by another Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant (2020-2024) and with colleagues at the Te Kotahi Research Institute of the University of Waikato on a project mapping similarities and differences between Māori and non-Māori in engaging with gene-editing technologies as part of a Ministry of Business, Industry, and Employment (MBIE) grant.

Professor Kurian is author/co-author or co-editor of six books. Her most recent co-authored book, Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented (2021) won the International Communication Association (ICA) PR Division's 'Outstanding Scholarly Book Award' in 2022. She is also author of Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Bank’s Environmental Policies (2019/2000). She is co-editor of Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture, and Development (2003/2005; 2016), Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice (2019), On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (2009), and International Organizations and Environmental Policy (1995). 

Her work has appeared in several high-impact journals including Organization, Political Science, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Nature Climate Change, Public Understanding of Science, Global Environmental Politics, Third World Quarterly, Public Relations Review, Management Communication Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, Futures, Sustainable Development, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences Communication, and Communications Biology.

A former journalist and a TED-X speaker, Priya enjoys teaching at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.  She also enjoys the stimulus of supervision and has supervised 16 PhD students to completion. In 2012 she won the University of Waikato’s Research Postgraduate Supervision Excellence Award. 

She is a co-founder and current trustee of Shama Ethnic Women’s Trust, which provides social work support and programmes for ethnic women and their families, including prevention of family and sexual violence. She is also a member of the Waikato Intercultural Fund Committee of the local philanthropic community foundation Momentum Waikato.