I began working on questions of environmental justice and community-led resource governance in 1998, and over the past 25 years my work has taken me across diverse landscapes in India, with a sustained engagement in the Western Himalaya. Through the Himdhara Collective, cofounded in 2009, I have worked in solidarity with communities and local organisations on forests, land and resource rights, the impacts of extractive infrastructures, and the politics of Himalayan environmentalism and development.
My PhD brings together questions that have emerged through years of practice, research and engagement with Himalayan communities. The project develops a situated critical political ecology of disasters and forests in the Himalaya, linking histories of colonial enclosure to contemporary environmental politics, climate and resilience governance, while foregrounding how these regimes shape vulnerability, belonging and contested mountain futures.
