Saumya Pandey
Current projects
Conflict Enclosures
Completed projects
The political economy of river sand mining in South Asia
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Saumya’s doctoral research is at the intersection of geology, science, and political economy. Her work follows the world’s second most sought after resources, sand, as it erodes, moves, and gets extracted from the Himalayan rivers across Nepal mountains and Nepal-India floodplains. Based on 12 months of ethnographic study and six months of archival research, she examines how the sediments’ deep past, materiality and agency are“naturalized” on a day-to-day basis for the prognostication of Nepal’s political economy, at a time of melting Himalayan glaciers and rising Bay of Bengal sea levels.
Saumya is trained in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. Formerly, she was a journalist in training for The Telegraph where she edited political commentaries and was involved with the daily editorial-page production. From 2014-16 as a student at TISS, her fieldwork focused on marginalised livelihoods, anti-displacement movements, education, and domestic violence in Maharashtra, India. These experiences built her insights to pursue questions that most concern her on extraction; inequality; environment; work; feminist thought; and ethics and politics of knowledge-making practices.
She currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and is an Associate Editor at the Public Anthropologist.