Field of Study USA: Geography

Carolisa Watson

Ms. Carolisa Watson is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at the University of Kansas. Her research revolves around questions of placemaking, home, and identity. She is engaged in collaborative ethnographic work with displaced communities. Ms. Watson has previously received FLAS funding to study Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese languages. She holds bachelor’s degrees in East Asian languages and literatures and in global and international studies from the University of Kansas; she also holds an MA in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.

Ms. Watson’s Fulbright-Hays project is examining how Tibetan identity is expressed through placemaking in Dharamsala and the ways in which place and identity interact. As a visiting scholar, Ms. Watson is involved in archival and ethnographic fieldwork exploring the relationships between Tibetans, Dharamsala, and the governmental organizations, and how they impact the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala; the project is being carried out by studying the historical, contemporary, political, and social contexts of “territorialized exile” in a city. It is also drawing upon an interdisciplinary background in geography, folklore, religious studies, and media studies to understand how individuals interact with their larger communities and the city itself to create meaningful places and express collective and individual identity.

Aman Luthra

Dr. Aman Luthra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in Washington, DC where he teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Prior to this position, Dr. Luthra taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Dr. Luthra’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to examine the changing nature of work in the informal recycling economy in urban Indian using mixed methods including surveys and interviews with traditional kabariwalas (buyers of recyclable materials) and new firms that that use digital technologies to try and stake a claim in this market space. In addition to contributing to scholarship on the increasing ‘platformization’ of services, Fulbright’s support for this research will not only contribute to the development of evidence-based policy prescriptions in India, it will also allow the researcher to learn from, contribute to and build long- lasting relationships at Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

Tsering Lhamo

Tsering Lhamo is a first-generation Tibetan-American PhD student. Her research is taking place under the guidance of Dr. Emily Yeh at the Geography Department of the University of Colorado Boulder. Coming from an interdisciplinary background in international development and global health, Tsering’s research interests center on the intersections of sustainable development, political ecology, traditional medicines, and cross-border trade within the Himalayan region. As an American India Foundation (AIF) William J. Clinton Fellow from 2017–2018, Tsering worked with the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) to conduct baseline research and interventions on reproductive health among adolescents in underserved female populations in rural mountain communities in Uttarakhand, India. Trained in biomedical sciences, Tsering has worked as a laboratory associate at the Yale New Haven Hospital. She has also served as an AmeriCorps volunteer where she tutored young students from underprivileged communities in Washington, D.C. Tsering holds a master’s degree in international development from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, where she specialized in environmental sustainability and global health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a minor in biology from the American University in Washington, D.C. Tsering is also a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s 2023 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for studying Nepali language.

Found in the Himalayas, the caterpillar fungus is an assemblage of organisms composed of a fungal body protruding from the head of its moth larva host. Valued within Chinese medicine and in biopharmaceuticals for its therapeutic functions, the fungus has been worth more than its weight in gold on the market. As a result, the fungus collection and trade are a source of as much as 50-90% of cash income for the Bhutia, Lepcha, Nepalese, and Tibetan people who participate in the fungus harvest and trade in the Indian Himalayas. However, not much is known about the caterpillar fungus trade in the Eastern Indian Himalayas. Tsering’s research seeks to understand the lived experiences of Himalayan communities in Siliguri region of North Bengal in the larger West Bengal state, using the caterpillar fungus trade as an analytical tool. Tsering will be working under the guidance of Dr. Swatasiddha Sarkar from the Centre for Himalayan Studies at North Bengal University in Siliguri, West Bengal. Dr. Sarkar’s expertise in the regional geography combined with his scholarship on labor and ethnicity will be paramount to my research on the caterpillar fungus trade in the region.

Kathleen O’Reilly

Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.

In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.

David Ghertner

Prof. David Ghertner received his BA from Colby College and MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University where he previously served as the director of the South Asian Studies Program. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (Cornell University Press, 2021). His research expertise lies in urban geography, and he has published widely on informal housing, property rights, urban aesthetics, and environmental governance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A series of digital property reform programs are currently spreading across rural India, utilizing drone mapping and digital technologies to map, title, and enclose landholdings. Digitized property rights are deemed essential to fighting poverty and fostering rural development, but also face technical and political challenges that vary by region and land tenure. The translation of customary rights, bordering of land, and construction of data infrastructure depend upon complex bureaucratic work. Through ethnographic research involving engineers and bureaucrats who are implementing the reforms in Goa and Delhi NCR and by interacting with residents impacted by these reforms, Prof. David Ghertner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how digital property is reconstituting landownership in India.

Samira Patel

Samira Patel graduated with an anthropology degree from the University of Chicago. She is especially committed to social justice and sensitive to how policies often exclude the most vulnerable people. She has spent almost a decade learning how this is particularly acute in climate- and environment-monitoring programs, having worked at the science–policy interface both at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and at the Center for Space Policy and Strategy. She joined the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge as a master’s student to critically examine how the science–policy interface and digital data infrastructures impact local communities. This led her to publish a dissertation, The Rise of a Technoscientific Third Pole: Climate Science, Data, and Culture in the Himalayan Cryosphere. She has also written and spoken about various issues related to the “Asian Arctic”; the politics of data sharing and data infrastructures; remote sensing and outer space policies; and pluralistic understandings of cold and icy places. She is currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar at SPRI, where she is pursuing a PhD in geography.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Samira is undertaking research for her PhD dissertation exploring the notions of climate futures in Ladakh. The inhabitants of Ladakh have long navigated the constraints of water in their high-altitude desert environment. Now, they must adapt to a shifting landscape due to climate change. Samira’s project is particularly focusing on the extent to which communities – local communities and communities of scientific practice – help shape and navigate these climate futures. Using ethnographic methods, she is examining how Ladakhi people leverage various scientific and/or local environmental knowledge to navigate the myriad challenges and anxieties of a warming planet.