Amy Leigh Johnson

My research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, legal/political anthropology, phenomenology of place, and settler colonial studies in South Asia.These themes are explored ethnographically in my dissertation, "State Re-Making: Federalism, Environment, and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Nepal," through a close analysis of the joint federal restructuring and constitution writing project implemented in Nepal at the end of the Maoist-State Conflict in 2006. The dissertation traces interactions between constitution writers, expatriate federalism experts, and Nepali public intellectuals drafting federal models in Kathmandu and connects the formalized political world of Constituent Assemblies to the experiences of indigenous communities and high caste Hindu settlers demanding new federal provinces in the Hills and lowland Tarai regions of farwestern Nepal. Building from these intersections,  the dissertation highlights how affective, phenomenological, and historical relationships to environment come to inform sensibilities of spatial-territorial ordering crucial to constitutional politics and state re-making in "post-conflict" Nepal. More broadly, the dissertation outlines a vision for an "environmental anthropology of the state" to demonstrate how human-environmental relations become  enrolled in the institutional design of nation-states and extra-state political systems--a phenomenon gaining increasing attention in the Anthropocene.

I received my doctorate from Yale University's Combined PhD Program in Anthropology and the School of the Environment in December 2020. I was a Research Fellow with the Sajag-Nepal project based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University from 2021-2023. I am presently Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Government and Sociology at Georgia College and State University.
Supervisors: Michael R. Dove, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Sara Shneiderman, Paul Kockelman, and Douglas Rogers
Address: 10 Sachem Street
New Haven, CT 06511