I am an environmental anthropologist and conservation social scientist based at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA). My doctoral research examines how conservation science, caste, and species politics co-produce human–wildlife relations in Central India, with a particular focus on the social and ecological consequences of tiger reintroduction. Approaching 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 work builds on earlier field research on landscape-scale conservation initiatives aimed at establishing wildlife corridors and mitigating the social impacts of large conservation and development projects that have resulted in displacement and deep livelihood uncertainty. Together, these experiences have shaped my enduring interest in ecology and human life as part of historically constituted socio-ecological assemblages produced through uneven and overlapping trajectories of conservation, development, and power.

​

Across my work, I am attentive to how anthropological knowledge travels across institutional, disciplinary, and epistemic boundaries. I treat translation not simply 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 communities most affected by environmental interventions, I use multimedia platforms such as short films, podcasts, blogs, and participatory methods including photovoice and collaborative mapping. In 2023, I released my first short documentary, Life on Hold, which explores the temporalities of waiting in forest landscapes shaped by deferred promises of development and justice. I am also drawn to wolves in India as analytical interlocutors for thinking about adaptation, survival, and multispecies politics in human-dominated landscapes—a commitment that led me to found the Wolf Conservation Initiative in 2013. My research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Rufford Foundation, and I currently serve in leadership and editorial roles within the Society for Conservation Biology and the American Anthropological Association.