THF Dialogues 3

Bios:

Mabel Denzin Gergan is an Assistant Professor in Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race. Trained as a human geographer, her research is grounded in the Indian Himalayan region where she studies the relationship between ‘mainland’ India and its borderland territories. Her scholarship and teaching attend to the racial and colonial logics underlying Indigenous communities’ disproportionate exposure to environmental risk and vulnerability. She is the founding member of an editorial and writing collective Desirable Futures that brings together scholars theorizing colonial constructions of time and futurity at the intersection of Black, Indigenous, and decolonial geographies.

Manshi Asher is a researcher-activist with 27 years’ of engagement with environmental and social justice. For nearly two decades she has lived and worked in the Western Himalaya, primarily Himachal Pradesh, where she co-founded the Himdhara Environment Research & Action Collective; since 2009 Himdhara has supported mountain communities and community based organisations defending their livelihoods and landscapes from the pressures of neoliberal extractivism. Apart from campaigns and advocacy rooted in grassroots research Manshi’s work includes writing—feature reports, opinion pieces and academic papers—offering grounded, critical perspectives on development, conservation, climate policy and resource politics in the region. She was Programs Convenor at the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics, where she helped develop education programmes for youth and activists through plural pedagogies. She was instrumental in designing and launching the program Pahar Aur Hum with Sambhaavnaa that brought together youth from the Himalaya to reflect on trajectories of mountain societies at the intersections of culture, economy, ecology and politics. Manshi identifies as a feminist who lives the slow life in the Dhauladhar valley, attuned to the rhythms of nature, motherhood, and the everyday joys and struggles of those who call the mountains their home.

Kesang Thakur is a researcher from the trans-Himalayan Lahaul Valley in Himachal Pradesh. She is the co-founder of Filming Lahaul, a cross-media ethnography project that documents localized responses to, and actions on, the socio-ecological transformations in her native valley. She is currently a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, where her project examines the effects of large-scale infrastructures in the Indian Himalayas, with a particular focus on the role of geostrategic Atal Rohtang Tunnel in reshaping environment, human, and non-human relations in Lahaul. She has curated artistic projects in Lahaul and Ladakh, in collaboration with collectives such as Life and Heritage of Lahaul and the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation. Her journalistic writing and collaborative academic work have been featured on platforms such as Himāl Southasian, The Wire, Dialogue Earth, SAGE, and Roadsides.