Phurwa Gurung Awarded Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship

Phurwa D Gurung, PhD Candidate in Geography, received the competitive Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF) funded by the Mellon Foundation. Phurwa was selected from a total of 870 applicants from graduate students at 112 universities. This year's 60 awardees represent thirty-one universities and fourteen disciplines. The SSRC IDRF fellowship will fund a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, for his dissertation research tentatively titled Reordering Highland Territories: State-building, indigeneity, and multispecies worldmaking. His dissertation takes caterpillar fungus as a lens to examine the ways in which state-led biodiversity conservation and resource extraction overlap and clash with Indigenous environmental governance in the Himalayas. 

Phurwa also recently published an article titled "Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making, territorialization, and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal" in the journal Environment and Planning E Nature and Space. He has also co-authored a book chapter with Ken Bauer titled "Infrastructures of change: Development among pastoralists in Dolpo, Nepal" for the Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia. The same book also has a chapter contributed by Dr. Tim Oakes of the Geography Department.