Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor of Indigenous Environmental Sciences
Department of Geography, Incoming July 2025
Research Themes
Indigenous political ecology | Visual geography | Indigenous environmental governance
Geographical Area(s) of Research
Nepal
Top Three Research Questions on Biodiversity Solutions and Sustainable Coexistence of People and Nature
1. How do different ways of knowing nature (for example, Indigenous land-based vs conservation science) interact, and with what consequences to both humans and the environment?
2. What is the role/place of Indigenous peoples and knowledge in the contemporary search for biodiversity solutions?
3. What does it mean to centre justice and deep reciprocity in biodiversity conservation?
Bio
Dr. Phurwa Dolpopa is an Indigenous political ecologist and visual geographer researching the interrelations of biodiversity conservation, Indigenous environmental governance, and multispecies worldmaking in the Nepal Himalayas. His dissertation focuses on the commodification of caterpillar fungus and the emergence of snow leopard as a posterchild of national and global conservation and development projects in his home region of Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, as case studies to examine the ways in which Indigenous knowledge and the affective materiality of these nonhumans shape and challenge dominant state-making processes and reconfigure alternate modes of knowing nature, and ultimately, what it means to be(come) human in a more-than-human world. His dissertation field research and community-engaged work have been funded by generous grants from the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Firebird Fellowship, and the National Geographic Society. His academic works on conservation, rural roadbuilding, and various aspects of agropastoral lifeways in the Himalayas have been published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Geoforum, HIMALAYA journal, and Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia, among others.