My current research deals with political economy and rural transformation in the Himalaya. I work, in particular on land, tourism, post-disaster, capitalist frontiers, and fragmented public authority. In earlier research, I have worked on landscape, territory, identity politics and local autonomy movement in the Nepal-India borderland. I am trained as a political scientist, but my research approach is highly interdisciplinary. My work relies on a combination of fieldwork and ethnographic methods with historical and textual analysis.
I am currently engaged in two different, yet complimentary research projects.
I am currently engaged in two different, yet complimentary research projects.
Firstly, as part of the Rule & Rupture research project (2016-2021), I'm conducting postdoctoral research on the formation of political authority through the recognition of claims to property and belonging in the Nepalese Himalaya. Taking the 2015 Himalayan earthquake as a rupture within a longer timeframe of drawn-out political transition, this project investigates how a context of political transition and increasing emphasis on tourism as an economic strategy interact with immediate post-disaster concerns and relocations to shape negotiations of political authority.
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Secondly, I'm also conducting research on the individual postdoctoral project Aftershock: Nature, Tourism and the Political Economy of Post-Disaster funded by the Danish Social Science Research Council (2017-2021). This project explores the transformative effect of natural disasters on fragile economies and theorizes the ‘aftershock’ as a particular environment for political-economic transformation. Taking the recent earthquake in the Himalayas as an example, it investigates what reconstruction means in an ecologically fragile location where tourism is strongly positioned as a developmental strategy and asks how the socio-economic landscape is rearranged in the aftermath of disaster.
Related presentations Tourism, Development and Himalayan Futures - Disparities and Imaginaries (Recorded Online Presentation, Centre for Himalayan Studies, University of North Bengal.) |