About Me.

I am an environmental anthropologist and conservation social scientist based at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA). My dissertation examines how conservation science, caste, and species politics co-produce human–wildlife relations in Central India, with particular attention to the social and ecological consequences of tiger reintroduction. Situating conservation as a form of governance rather than a purely technical intervention, I trace how scientific expertise, caste-based social hierarchies, and charismatic megafauna become entangled in everyday negotiations over land, labor, and belonging. This research emerged from earlier fieldwork in Central India on a landscape-scale management project focused on establishing wildlife corridors between protected areas and mitigating the social impacts of large-scale conservation and development initiatives that resulted in displacement and profound livelihood uncertainty. These experiences shaped my enduring interest in the intersections of ecology and human life as part of a historically constituted socio-ecological assemblage, one produced through uneven and overlapping trajectories of conservation, development, and power.

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Across my work, I am attentive to how anthropological knowledge moves across institutional, disciplinary, and epistemic boundaries. I approach translation not as dissemination but as an analytic and ethical practice that reveals how conservation categories, such as “corridor,” “conflict,” or “coexistence, ”are reworked in practice. To engage diverse audiences, including conservation practitioners, ecologists, and the communities most affected by environmental interventions, I employ multimedia platforms, short films, podcasts, and blogs, as modes of ethnographic storytelling. In 2023, I released my first short documentary, 'Life on Hold,' which foregrounds the temporalities of waiting in Central India, where forest-dwelling communities live with prolonged uncertainty and make consequential decisions amid partial information and deferred promises of development and justice.

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I am also drawn to wolves in India as analytical interlocutors for thinking about adaptation, survival, and multispecies politics in human-dominated landscapes. Despite persistent conservation challenges, wolves have survived by navigating shifting agrarian economies, legal regimes, and moral landscapes. Attending to wolves’ lives allows me to ask how multispecies worlds are continually negotiated and contested under contemporary political and ecological pressures, and what these negotiations reveal about human social worlds. To pursue these questions, I founded the Wolf Conservation Initiative in 2013, which advances research and conservation efforts focused on wolves and grassland ecosystems across South Asia.

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Drawing on political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and human–animal studies, I work closely with Dalit and Adivasi communities to foreground the lived realities of conservation beyond protected areas and to challenge enclosure-centric models of environmental governance. My doctoral research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Rufford Foundation, and I have collaborated with the Wildlife Institute of India as an External Scholar for conducting fieldwork in Central India and continuing my long-term engagement with the institute. I currently serve as Secretary of the Social Science Working Group of the Society for Conservation Biology, co-editor of its blog The Social, and a Student Board Member of the Anthropology & Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association.

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I am committed to inclusive, community-engaged conservation and regularly employ participatory methods, such as photovoice, collaborative mapping, and storytelling, as epistemological interventions that center multispecies perspectives in environmental governance.