Durga Kale is a cultural anthropologist and qualitative researcher with a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Calgary. She brings her love for people-facing research to YARI. She hopes to continue the narrative analysis of qualitative data and review existing literature on education in Alberta to supplement publications for the projects at YARI. Her doctoral research focused on the religious narratives in South Asia from the medieval to the modern period. With a close reading of the texts and the data from her ethnographical research, she maps the use of religious storytelling as a tool for laying claims on the local landscape in port towns of South Asia. 

Durga was named Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholar (2021) and her research has been nominated for two prominent research awards in Canada and the USA. In 2018, she secured generous funding from the Calgary Institute for Humanities (CIH) and founded an interdisciplinary Working Group that focused on thinking critically about human and landscape relationships. An edited volume on the "Narrative Analysis of Storytelling on Landscapes in the Global South" is being put together as a culmination of three-year-long collaborative research by the working group. She has been hosting an open-source podcast on the Anthropology and Archaeology of South Asia since 2020.

She hopes to make research more equitable and accessible, and her activities are archived at www.kalemighty.com and www.linkedin.com/in/durgakale/