Nadine Plachta

I am a human-environment geographer working across critical Indigenous studies, political ecology, and multispecies ethnography. My research explores how communities in South Asia navigate and contest the intersecting challenges of climate change, conservation policies, and infrastructure development. 

I study these tensions because they sit at the center of ongoing struggles over Indigenous rights, recognition, and epistemic justice: who gets to decide what a place is for, whose knowledge counts as expertise, and what forms of care and resistance become possible as development efforts and conservation regimes reorganize land and life.

My current book project draws on extensive fieldwork in the high mountain regions of Nepal, particularly the Tsum Valley. It examines how Indigenous ecological knowledge and practices of care shape environmental governance and land stewardship, and how their incorporation into formal law under the country’s new federal democracy opens up pathways toward Indigenous sovereignty. I have also written on the social and environmental impacts of extractive infrastructure projects, and on the protests and refusals that emerge in response. Across this work, I pursue collaborative, place-based, and relational approaches that connect ethnography and storytelling, and that take seriously the people and more-than-human worlds I learn from and am accountable to.

I also serve on the Executive Committee of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) and am an Editorial Board member of Roadsides, an open-access journal engaging critically with all sorts of infrastructure.