Social Sciences

Suchismita Das is an Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences division of the School of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Centre for Inter-Asian Research. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and her MA and MPhil in Sociology from Delhi University. She served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and as a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before joining Ahmedabad University. Her research traces the intersections between environmental vulnerability and political vulnerability on India’s north-eastern frontier.   

Suchismita is broadly interested in anthropologically examining the transformation of the Development State in the Anthropocene. Specifically, her research trajectory seeks to assess how a reckoning with climate change impacts ethnopolitics, agrarian imaginaries and disaster preparedness in the Eastern Himalayas. Her doctoral ethnography analyses how ethnic groups participating in market-oriented conservation projects in Sikkim tie their cultural diversity with the valued biodiversity of the landscape, and transform the multicultural politics of the region into a form of bio-cultural politics. She is currently embarking on an ethnographic project that examines infrastructure-collapse in the Himalayan region as a material index of social experiences of climate change.

Reassembling Diversity: Environmentalism, Markets, and Recognition Politics in the Eastern Himalaya

This book project, based on her doctoral research, aims to widen the scope of the analysis of multicultural recognition in India. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sikkim, she traces how ‘diversity’ is reimagined in the Anthropocene, when, with the rise of biodiversity conservation discourses, it is not only a social, but also an ecological good. As ethnic minorities hitch their cultural diversity to the valued biota of the region, thereby seeking validation as inter-species assemblages, the book evaluates the scope of this emergent multispecies recognition politics, and its impact on India’s motto of ‘unity in diversity’.

Development Imaginaries, Infrastructure and Climate Subjectivities in Asia - Funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, USA)

Using this ‘Seed Grant for Collaborative Research on Asia’ Dr Das and Dr Hayden Shelby from the University of Cincinnati, USA are parallelly conducting ethnographic studies of border road construction projects in Sikkim, India and of a canal redevelopment program in Bangkok, Thailand. By comparing two infrastructure development projects in two different topographical and geo-political positions in Asia – i.e., an upland border state and a lowland metropolitan city – this study examines the impact of climate change discourses on development imaginaries and planning, and conversely the impact of development imaginaries on climate change discourses and adaptation practices. Their work aims to interrogate how specific material interventions by two development states in the global south mediate people’s experience of climate change and of climate vulnerability, and influences their subjective outlook towards their future in these times of acute environmental vulnerability.

Cultural Analysis of Environmental Precarity and Adaptation in the Eastern Himalayas - Funded by Ahmedabad University

The above mentioned collaborative research is tied to a longer individual ethnographic project focusing on the increasing vulnerability of mountain roads to severe weather conditions, and people's adaptive response to this phenomenon. This study examines environmental adaptation as a negotiation between the politics of development, the science of climate adaptation and the everyday cultural perceptions of precarity.

Perceptions of Risk in the Himalayas

Drawing on her research interest, Dr Das has been running an interdisciplinary webinar series, where scholars from different disciplines analyze how the concept of "risk" has been generative in constituting the Himalayas as a geological, cultural, historical and politcal site. Details about the series can be found here. 

Peer reviewed, single author:

• 2024  “ ‘We are Children of a Lesser God’: Disaster Relief as Election Handout in the Indian Himalaya”. Engagement - The online publication of the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Read more

• 2023. “Politically Branding India’s ‘First Fully Organic State’: Re-Signification of Traditional Practices and Markets in Organic Agriculture.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 36 (4): 20. 

• Revise and resubmit, “Of Nepali People and Indian Peacocks: Political Recognition in Bio-Cultural  Assemblages on the Himalayan Frontier”. 

• 2014, “Sikkim the Place and Sikkim the Documentary: Reading Political History through the Life and After-Life of a Visual Representation”. Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 33(1):42-56.

• 2011, “Ecotourism, Sustainable Development and the Indian State”. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 46 (37): 60-67.

Book reviews

• 2022  “Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas.” Anthropology Book Forum Volume 8.

• 2019, “The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics.” Conservation and Society 17(3):312–13.

 Courses at Ahmedabad University

       Undergraduate courses:

• History of the Social (Social and Political Sciences Core Course)
• Climate Change and Society (Social and Political Sciences Elective)
• Development and its Discontents (Social and Political Sciences Elective)
• Thesis research and wriitng (Social and Political Sciences Core Course)
• Fundamentals of Environmental Studies (Course co-caught with an interdisciplinary team)
• Identity, Inequality and Difference (Social and Political Sciences Elective)
• Environment and Climate Change (Studio-based Foundation Course for all students)
• Ahmedabad as Gateway to the World (History and Social Science Core)

      Graduate courses:

• Contemporary Environmental Anthropology
• Ethnographies of Environment, Body, and Healing

Prior under-graduate teaching           

• Social Science Theory: Self, Culture, Society
• Facing Climate Change in the Global South              
• Anthropology and/of Tourism: of Otherness and Encounters
• State and Society in India
• Biodiversity: Science, Politics, and Development  

• 2022   Social Science Research Council (SSRC, USA) Seed Grant for Collaborative Research on Asia. Project: Development Imaginaries, Infrastructure and Climate Subjectivities in Asia
• 2022-25  Start-up Grant from Ahmedabad University. Ethnographic project: ‘Cultural Analysis of Environmental Precarity and Adaptation in the Eastern Himalayas’

Associate Editor for academic journal Development in Practice