Amit John
Kurien
Independent Researcher
NA
I locate my interest at the convergence of environmental change and rural societal dynamics. My PhD focuses on agricultural intensification in shifting cultivation landscapes and examines the causes of intensification of both the shifting cultivation practice and well as the wider agrarian transformation, and its consequences for people's livelihood strategies, sustainability, and equity in Garo Hills, Meghalaya in Northeast India. 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 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.