Researching South Asia: Animals

Muhammad Kavesh is a Faculty of Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellow at the Australian National University. He is the author of “Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan” and co-editor of a special journal issue, “Sense Making in a More-than-Human World."

Naisargi N. Davé is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Queer Activism in India and of the forthcoming, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being.

Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019, as well as articles published in American Ethnologist, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Cultural Anthropology, and HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Ambika Aiyadurai is Assistant Professor (Anthropology) at the Indian Institute of Technology – Gandhinagar. She is an anthropologist of wildlife conservation with a special interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation projects. Her ongoing and long-term research aims to understand how local and global forces shape human-animal relations. She completed her PhD thesis in Anthropology at the National University of Singapore in 2016. She is trained in both natural and social sciences with masters’ degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India (Dehradun) and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London (UK) funded by Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Program. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship to examine community-based wildlife projects. Her monograph, Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published by Oxford University Press (UK). 2021.