Dr Amy Johnson

I am a Political and Environmental Anthropologist of South Asia, based in Nepal, with a particular interest in the restructuring of states and environmental relations. I joined Northumbria in March 2021 as a Research Fellow with Sajag-Nepal: Preparedness and planning for the mountain hazard and risk chain in Nepal. I am working with Dr. Katie Oven, in coordination with social and natural scientist colleagues in Nepal, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, to explore community perceptions and responses to earthquake and landslide environmental change in relation to Nepal’s political transformation and regional geopolitics.  

My broader program of research focuses on the reterritorialization of the nation-state and its future forms, which I study in the context of local environmental relationships and imbricated national, regional, and international imaginations of state territoriality. I have a particular interest in the intimate roles place and kinship play in the production of state formations and the execution of state power, especially shifting senses of national belonging and accompanying cartographic imaginations. I am likewise interested in professional-academic experimentation with state forms and the global circulation of state reconstruction expertise, for instance the promotion of federalism as an ideal type political system to mitigate internal conflicts and regionalism and to accommodate diversity in “failing” states.  I bring these themes together ethnographically in my doctoral dissertation, State Re-Making: Federalism, Environment, and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Nepal.