Field Notes

My research employs multi-sited, multi-lingual, and long-term fieldwork and oral history documentation/analysis, with some GIS and participatory mapping. I've done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast India, China, Myanmar (Burma), and Bangladesh since 2012.

My fieldwork focuses on regions where frontier economies such as SEZs, agribusiness, new infrastructures, hydropower, and gems, wildlife, and timber extraction are expanded and extracted over contested territories, where both people and nature have historically been subject to colonial border demarcations, post-colonial state surveillance/militarisation, citizenship and identity battles.

I use multiple Asian languages for my fieldwork, including Mandarin Chinese, Assamese, Hindi, Bengali, and Nagamese; as well as Burmese, Mizo, and Nepali (in varying degrees of fluency); with the help of committed colleagues and translators co-researching with me on the ground.

Feel free to explore some of my selected fieldwork notes and photographs on this page.

Selected fieldnotes/excerpts.

A 'hole in the wall': Everyday life and place of A Rohingya woman living in between China and Myanmar. (Click to read)

Interviews with elders on a revolutionary Borderbase on the China Myanmar Borderlands. (Click to read)

Watch the war, hide the refugees: Notes from the China border during conflict. (Click to read.)

Selected fieldwork Photographs

** These photographs were taken across Northeast India, Myanmar, and Southwest China -- in Mizoram, Assam, Yangon, Rakhine state, Chin state, Shan state, Kachin state, and Yunnan where I did field research for my Ph.D. between 2015-2019. The photos with visible people's profiles are those where I was explicitly invited by the individuals to photograph them for display in a public format.

These photos are a tribute to the men, women, children I met over the course of these years, who I cannot name here for security reasons.

You were generous enough to let me photograph you in your camps, prayer rooms, homes, bases and border markets. You told me stories even when you’d lost your homes to mortar shelling. Thank you for so generously sharing with me your poetics, cheer, love, humor, laughter, camaraderie, excellent food, and fresh air. Thank you for letting me into your lives and stories -- no matter how meagre the means, how ‘remote’ the territory, how depleted the resources, how damaged the environment, or how close the war was getting to you.

I hope the war that you were forced to live with shall not be the lives of your children, even as you still carry despair and hope, with guns and guitars for now. It is my only hope that our research can do whatever little possible to shed some light to the lives, ecologies, and struggles on the ground, even as we write from an immmese space of privilende in the global academy.

Children born and growing up inside an 'IDP' (Internally displaced Refugee camp ) in Northern Shan State, Myanmar. Their ancestral village land was confiscated to make way for Chinese-funded monocultures in liaison with Burmese military linked-militia groups. (Shan State, Myanmar. 2016.)

A close-knit 'IDP' camp supported by Kachin development organisations along the China-Myanmar border. Often these camps are outside the access of international funding.

An 'IDP' camp surrounded by the serene Mount Kara in the China-Myanmar borders. The serenity is often disrupted with the eruption of fighting between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic armed organization, that has guarded these territories against military incursion and fought for autonomy and federalism in Myanmar since 1962.