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Tashi Delek! My name is Phurwa Dondrub Gurung, a fifth-year doctoral student at the department. I also did an MA here. Over the years, I feel so grateful to have received rigorous training from and with outstanding teachers and peers in theories and methods relevant to the key areas of my focus: political ecology, critical development studies, and Indigenous geographies. I have benefited immensely from the dedicated support of my Committee and the unparalleled mentorship from my Advisor, who guided me in all aspects of graduate training: teaching, research, publishing, grant-writing, and the job market. I feel truly fortunate to have been part of the vibrant and supportive CU Boulder Geography community! Ìý

Based on nearly two years of ethnographic field research (2023-24) in Dolpo, Nepal, my home and research site, my PhD dissertation research develops a deep and critical understanding of how Himalayan lifeways interweave and fare with global biodiversity conservation efforts and national state-making projects. I focus on two key nonhuman agents, the caterpillar fungus and the snow leopard, to understand the intersections of global and national conservation governance with Indigenous territorialities and place-based governance. I examine how these nonhumans participate in coproducing the state, Dolpopa identity, and multispecies worlds in a context of profound socio-environmental transformations in the high Himalaya. Ìý

My research is grounded in participatory, visual, community-engaged, and Indigenous methodologies. To this end, I employed ethnography, documentary filmmaking, participatory mapping and painting, solicited journals, and a collaborative in-situ documentation of oral literature as the primary methods of knowing and being in good relation with my community. The dissertation fieldwork and the multimodal, community-engaged works have been supported by generous grants from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC IDRF), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Firebird Fellowship, National Geographic Society, American Philosophical Society, and the CU Office of Outreach and Engagement. I am currently working on my dissertation, which I plan to defend in August 2025.

I accepted a new position in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I will join in July 2025 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences. UBC is an ideal academic home for the kind of work I do, with its vibrant community of Indigenous scholars engaged in critical work on Indigenous issues, both locally and globally. In addition to teaching, I will continue expanding my community-engaged works I began during my PhD studies here. I am especially looking forward to the postproduction of a documentary film I shot during my field research and publishing a bilingual multimedia book of Dolpo folk songs.

I will also be affiliated with UBC’s Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions Collaboratory, where I am eager to collaborate with scholars across the disciplines to develop policy-relevant solutions to biodiversity conservation that center Indigenous knowledge. I also look forward to joining and getting to know new colleagues in the Department of Geography, the Himalaya Program, and Critical Indigenous Studies at UBC. And of course, my family is excited to explore the beautiful mountains and waters of British Columbia! Ìý Ìý