Alex Aisher

Research

Multispecies ethnography, place-based conservation, indigenous environmental knowledge, climate change, forest and mountain ecologies, religion and ritual, shamanism, narrative and storytelling, participatory methods. In 2003, Alex became the first foreign scholar for over forty years to conduct longterm anthropological fieldwork with an indigenous group in the internationally contested borderland of Arunachal Pradesh in the Eastern Himalayas, an area now recognised as the second most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. In 2007, he was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007-2011), during which worked on participatory decision support for indigenous-led conservation. In 2016, with Professor Vinita Damodaran of the Centre for World Environmental History, he co-edited a special issue on place-based conservation through a multispecies lens, in the leading interdisciplinary journal Conservation and Society. This volume brings together the work of leading international anthropologists and environmental historians across South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, to develop a new framework for place-based conservation in the Global South. His current research explores community-based conservation in protected areas.