Biography

Before coming to Cambridge, I spent several years working on issues of climate migration, land tenure governance, reforestation, and community rights across multiple continents. Therein, I worked with forest communities, environmental defenders, women’s groups, farmers, pastoralist communities, fishers, and environmental organisations in Asia, North America, and Africa, which shaped my research and advocacy interests in land rights, and social and environmental justice. During my PhD, I examined how environmental defenders negotiate ecosystem and community protection and fight for the rights of nature and people under restricted civic space. Through my research, I wish to centre creative practices of land stewardship and regeneration often ignored in scholarship, and centre the land as a critical site for sovereignty and liberation movements. I am interested in participatory research methods, which work with communities to shape and inform the research agenda and outcomes. Through my time at Cambridge and beyond, I hope to share my research through public-facing means and flatten the power hierarchies between how research is credited and produced, and to translate scholarship in ways that are accessible and useful within and outside the academy.