Research

In the Nepal Himalaya, global climate change, geomorphology, and geopolitics constitute the stuff of everyday life. Navigating tectonic, climactic, and political change is routine ... until it isn't. Landslides, literal and figurative, appear to happen in the blink of an eye but the semantics of their happening reveal themselves over longer durations. My person and place-entered ethnographic research foregrounds the  slow aggradation of political and environmental changes in social practices and systems of meaning to account for the experiential contours of rural futures unfolding in South Asia. How residents of low altitude Himalayan landscapes (Tarai, Dun, Besi) navigate interconnected changes to environmental, political, and social systems is of special interest to me given the importance of lower elevations to livelihoods, development, and state formation in the Himalayan region historically and to the present remaking of those relations through migration, urbanisation, and cross-border political movements. Click below to learn more about my research.