Amit John
Kurien
Assistant Professor
RV University
My research is located at the convergence of environment change and rural societal dynamics focusing on the political and ecological dimensions of land-use change in swidden landscapes in Garo Hills in Northeast India. Specifically, the interest is to understand the character of intensitification of swidden (jhum) and the concurrent socioecological phenomenon of tree plantation expansion. I study the linkages between social and ecological factors operating at the household, village, and landscape-level, and its relevance in explaining the simultaneous decline combined with the continued 'persistence' of shifting cultivation, nature of forest cover, and livelihood sustainability, with a keen interest in contributing to land management and policy. The study is framed within the context of a changing rural agrarian landscape with modifications to shifting cultivation, indigenous village societies in sociocultural transition, historical continuities of intercontinental trade and new market linkages, and contemporary changes in the political economy of Northeast India in the context of the global capitalist system. I am also studying its consequences for well-being, socioeconomic differentiation, and livelihood sustainability. I espouse an interdisciplinary research framing and the need for methodological pluralism to approach such complex human-environment 'problems'. I use remote sensing and GIS, archival data, and qual-quant social science methods in my work. I am a botanist-conservation biologist by early training and formally trained in the broad field of environmental social science during PhD.