I am a social and environmental anthropologist interested in ideas of well-being, moral economy, kinship, gender, and nonhuman governance as these themes intersect with debates in political ecology and global conservation in a climate altered world. My research is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, a global conservation hotspot emblematic also of the ongoing climate emergency, located on the borders of India and Bangladesh. My research offers new conceptions of conservation that are not solely concerned with the preservation of biodiversity but instead encompass broader life-projects that interrogate notions of sufficiency, human and nonhuman sovereignty, and account for the importance of kinship and care as well as the disruptive forces that accompany gendered forms of care.

My future research project, funded by the AXA research grant, tentatively titled “Centring the Household in a Global Climate Crisis” will be an exploration of women’s mobility and immobility vis-à-vis their roles in both social reproduction and the market. I pay attention to marriage, as well as sex trafficking (which often takes place under the euphemism of marriage) as well as women’s elopement and abandonment, with climate-induced displacement, coastal erosion, and migration as the backdrop to these shifts within families and households. What is often misidentified as migration due to climate change and eroding coastlines is in fact also women’s desires to escape abusive households, play out amorous relationships, and find ways of securing a better future for their children’s lives. Building on my long-term fieldwork in the Bay of Bengal delta, my future research moves towards new directions by complicating the reductive relationship between ongoing agrarian and climate migration to proposing alternative discourses of displacement, mobility and migration that foreground pre-existing socio-environmental vulnerabilities.

I welcome being approached by PhD students for supervision on the following themes: political ecology; mythology; conservation; the politics of care; gendered vulnerability; migration and ecological refugees; the social life of climate change; consumption, aspirations and degrowth; longstanding vulnerabilities; the moral economies of risk and disaster; everyday governance.