Ashok Gurung, Principal Investigator

Ashok Guring is Founding Senior Director of the India China Institute (ICI) and Professor of Practice in the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. A native of Nepal, Mr. Guring has over twenty years of international development experience as an educator, researcher, manager, grant-maker, policy analyst, activist and training facilitator with civil society groups, academic institutions, foundations and multi-lateral organizations, and governments worldwide. He has taught several courses on development management, political and social issues in Nepal at The New School including “Global Himalaya: Rethinking Culture and Ecology.” Mr. Guring holds an MA in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, a BA in International Service and Development from World College West in Petaluma, California, and a Certificate in Norwegian Culture and Society from the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway.

Pasang Sherpa, Post-Doc Fellow

Pasang Sherpa is an anthropologist from the Everest region in Nepal. She was a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University (2013-2015), and was a postdoctoral fellow at The New School (2015-2016) before joining the Nepal Studies Initiative, initially as a visiting scholar. She previously served as an executive council member of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and a board member of the Resources Himalaya Foundation in Kathmandu. She has a decade of field-based research experience studying human dimensions of climate change, indigeneity, and development in the Himalaya. She is the recipient of the 2014 Senior Fellowship award from Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.

Mark Larrimore, Research Scholar

Mark Larrimore is Associate Professor of Religion at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. He received his PhD in Religion from Princeton University and his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Worcester College, Oxford.

Rafi Youatt, Research Scholar

Rafi Youatt is Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. His main areas of research are global politics and international relations, particularly on questions relating to environment, ecology, anthropocentrism, and the politics of the human. His forthcoming book, Interspecies Politics: Nature, States, Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2020), argues that that international politics is in fact a form of interspecies politics, all the way down, with a focus on the politics and ecology of American borderlands. His first book was Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics, published with University of Minnesota Press in 2015.

Chris Crews, Research Scholar

Chris Crews is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Political Theory at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City, where his work focuses on the intersections of religious worldviews and environmental politics in the Anthropocene—especially Earth-centered and animist spiritual traditions. He is an anti-racist organizer and has been involved with and written extensively about social and environmental justice movements in Ohio and New York. Through his involvement with the India China Institute he has worked in China, India and Nepal. 

Mukta Lama, Research Scholar

Mukta S. Lama Tamang is an anthropologist and teaches at the Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. He is also serving as Research Director for a research project on Social Inclusion Atlas and Ethnographic Profile. His research interests include indigeneity, history, memory, identity, social inclusion, equality and human rights in Nepal and South Asian region. Mukta received his PhD from Cornell University. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Jawaharlal Nehru University in conjunction with a joint research project on Social Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia.

Shekhar Pathak, Research Scholar

Shekhar Pathak is an Indian historian, writer and academician from Uttarakhand. He is a founder of the People’s Association for Himalaya Area Research (PAHAR), established in 1983, former Professor of History at Kumaun University, Nainital and a Nehru Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Teen Murti in New Delhi. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2007.

Douji, Research Scholar

Gesangqimei, Project Coordinator