Antioch University proudly announces that Priya Tallam, EdD, a 2025 graduate of the EdD program in Educational and Professional Practice, has published her dissertation titled:
Seeds in a Pluriverse: Visakha Society for the Protection and Care of Animals’ Inclusive Praxis Toward Self-Determined Just Socio-Ecological Territories.
Tallam’s dissertation explores the question: How might an NGO’s grassroots efforts in urban Visakhapatnam, India, propagate living justly with animals we encounter and severely Othered humans, beyond attitudes of guardianship, mitigating universalized harms to nature and society?
Through a transdisciplinary and phenomenological lens, she examines how inclusive, decolonial practices at the grassroots level can foster just multispecies communities, transcending caste, ability, gender, sex, class, and species within the urban context of Visakhapatnam.
Her work is a response to the global crisis of socio-ecological degradation and calls attention to transformative grassroots efforts that center interspecies coexistence, local knowledge, and inverse infrastructures. Tallam offers a compelling analysis of how such movements contest patriarchal, colonial systems of harm and provide a pathway toward a more just and pluriversal world.
A former architect and urban planner with three decades of public service in both India and California, Tallam has deep expertise in geospatial technologies and their application to land use, water management, habitat conservation, public health, and disaster recovery. She is especially interested in using GIS to support urban and wild animal welfare, and she welcomes opportunities to share her strategic insights in this field.
As part of her doctoral research, Tallam collaborated with the Visakha Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (VSPCA) on India’s east coast, supporting biodiversity practices that blend traditional knowledge with science and technology to build resilient, biophilic communities.
Her work is grounded in pluralism, womanism, and queer ecologies—offering a vital contribution to the growing field of multispecies justice.
Learn more here.
