The University of Western Australia

Graduate Student, School of Social and Cultural Studies

PhD Candidate

Thesis Title: Natural Resources Conflict through the Lens of Cultural Politics: A Case of Changthang Wildlife Sanctuary, India.

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Summary of my research

My research framework is based on the cultural politics paradigm (Baviskar 2008,2010), which expands and enriches the political-economic analyses of natural resource conflict to explain the changing relations among states, markets, social groups and their bio-physical environment. The main strength of this approach is to explore the ‘symbolic dimension and complex material’ of how natural resources come to be imagined, appropriated and contested. My research takes up the case of a protected area i.e. Changthang Wildlife Sanctuary, located on the Indo-Chinese borders in Ladakh region of India, in an attempt to understand those complex practices in which the ‘everyday’ contestations and competing claims around Changthang wildlife sanctuary take place, as well as  how they are negotiated, deflected or pre-empted by the multiple groups, laying claim over the region’s natural resources. By emphasizing on the everyday practices, my research will draw out those environmental complexities which treat identities, interests and resources, not as pre-determined givens, but as emergent products by looking at the specificity of actor’s contradictory lived experiences. As environmental use and abuse become even more fiercely contested across the world, my proposed research is a contribution, through the fresh perspective of cultural politics to understand the nexus of social conflict, environmental claims and community identities.

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