I am an environmental anthropologist and conservation social scientist based at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA), where I am a PhD Candidate in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology, a National Geographic Explorer, and an external scholar at the Wildlife Institute of India.

 

My work asks a single question across very different landscapes: who and what gets to count as worth protecting, and who or what gets treated as a pest, a competitor, or simply invisible? Across a decade of fieldwork, among Changpa pastoralists and wild kiang in Ladakh, Nilgai on the edges of Delhi, tiger-reintroduction landscapes in Central India, and my long-running work founding and running the Wolf Conservation Initiative, I have traced how the same social logic keeps repeating: caste hierarchy and conservation science together decide which species and which people are worth saving, and which are not.

 

My doctoral research follows this question. In Central India, tiger reintroduction is remaking the social and ecological order of the landscape, not just for tigers, but for wolves, for pastoralists, and for the caste communities living at the margins of protected forest. I trace how conservation expertise, scientific data, and caste hierarchy become entangled in everyday decisions about land, labor, and belonging, treating conservation as a form of governance rather than a purely technical intervention. This dissertation research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, a National Geographic Award, a Rufford Foundation Small Grant, and multiple awards from the University of Georgia.

 

Before the dissertation, I spent three years as a researcher with the Wildlife Institute of India, developing the Landscape Management Plan for the Ken-Betwa River Link Project's impact on Panna Tiger Reserve. This work grounds my critical research in firsthand experience of how conservation planning actually gets made inside the state apparatus.I am equally committed to bringing this work to audiences beyond the academy. I use short films, podcasts, blogs, and participatory methods like photovoice and collaborative mapping to make conservation categories, "corridor," "conflict," "coexistence," visible as contested and reworked in practice. My first documentary, Life on Hold (2023), explores the temporalities of waiting in forest landscapes shaped by deferred promises of development and justice.

 

I founded the Wolf Conservation Initiative in 2013 to advance research and conservation of wolves and grassland ecosystems across South Asia, species and habitats that receive a fraction of the attention and funding of India's more charismatic megafauna.

 

Scholars, practitioners, and students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds or working in the Global South, are welcome to reach out with questions about fieldwork, graduate training, or engaged conservation research.