Lab members

Sabikun Naher

Sabikun Naher is a PhD student in Anthropology whose research focuses on the historical and contemporary processes of marginalization faced by ethnic minorities, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. She examines how colonial and post-colonial state-building practices have shaped ethnic identities, territories, and relationships between majority and minority groups. Sabikun emphasizes the lived experiences of women, highlighting how they navigate and resist socio-political and economic marginalization, including issues related to land control and the construction of identity. Additionally, she has published extensively on gender, identity, and minority rights in order to inform inclusive policies that promote social justice, self-determination, and improved relations between majority and minority communities in Bangladesh and beyond. 

sabikun@uga.edu 

Asif Sandeelo

Asif Sandeelo is a Ph.D. student in Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology. His research explores the interface of conservation and politics through a case study of elite falconry in semi-desert areas of Sindh, Pakistan. He is particularly interested in how elite falconers with political influence and economic power challenge conservation laws and policies; co-constitute narratives of environmental organizations; and in so doing, shape conservation practices and sovereignty over law and territory. Drawing on the concept of “multi-species diplomacy,” his work also explores how the relations between humans and non-human species (falcons, and the Houbara bustards these falcons are used to hunt) influence international relations between Pakistan and Gulf States. Asif’s areas of interest include the politics of conservation, the politics of knowledge, multi-species ethnography, bird conservation, and customary land rights. With more than 9 years of experience at WWF-Pakistan, Asif worked in different conservation projects, where he developed his interest in the interconnections between politics and conservation. He also contributes articles for media outlets on environmental themes such biodiversity conservation, climate change, water governance and natural resource management.

asif.sandeelo@uga.edu 

Adarsh Kumar Shahi

Adarsh Kumar Shahi is a first-year PhD student in Anthropology and Integrative Conservation (ICON) at the University of Georgia. His work engages with land and forest rights, political ontologies of land and loss, cartographic imagination and its relationship to state power, and how labor, land, and life intersect in the production of alternative futures in the face of systemic loss and state violence. Focusing on Adivasi (indigenous) and forest-dwelling communities in northern India, his research attempts to understand lived experiences of dispossession and ecological loss, human-animal entanglement, and resistant becomings as creative acts that contest state power and caste and re-make them at the margins.

Adarsh.Shahi@uga.edu

Laura German

The Institutions and Governance Lab is directed by Dr. Laura German, Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Integrative Conservation Research.  While her scholarship has shifted from constructive (policy- and practice-oriented) to more critical orientations over time, she has an ongoing interest in engaged research in the service of social justice and environmental sustainability. One body of her recent work has focused on interrogating the truth claims of powerful actors.  Her latest book, Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance (University of Michigan Press, 2022), takes a critical look at the knowledge claims underlying the dominant "land governance" response to the 2007/08 outcry over global land grabbing. She does this through a look at the interests animating these discourses, the worlds they bring into being, and the world-making projects foreclosed in the process. Dr. German is also engaged in an ongoing partnership with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in support of their efforts to restore relations with homelands. This includes work to address the harmful social and ecological legacies of fire suppression and to create opportunities for Indigenous youth in land-based STEM fields.

Dr. German welcomes expressions of interest from students and collaborators wishing to push the boundaries of current thought and practice to foster more just and sustainable futures.

Lgerman@uga.edu

Anya Bonanno

Anya Bonanno received her PhD in Anthropology in August, 2024. Since then, she has been involved in collaborative research at the USDA Forest Service’s Southern Research Station as an ORISE scholar. Her primary research interest centers on the ways property, especially in its vernacular, is made through relationships with other people and beings in varied cultural and structural contexts. In her dissertation based in rural Sierra Leone, she explored this interest through related questions of customary agrarian institutions, more-than-human relationships, and global development discourse on gendered land rights. Most recently, she is addressing how contested histories of land loss and tenure change in northern New Mexico may continue to shape rural communities’ trust in federal wildfire mitigation initiatives. She is also beginning an applied study to analyze the extent to which housing affordability poses a labor gap for the USDA Forest Service’s increased wildfire mitigation work in Western treatment landscapes, where many towns grapple with a shift from natural resource-based to amenity-driven local economies.

anya.bonanno@uga.edu

Katie Foster

Katie Foster is an environmental anthropologist based at the University of Georgia. Broadly, her research focuses on environmental governance and the ambiguous role of policy within complex multi-scalar social-ecological challenges. As a postdoctoral researcher with the Network for Engineering with Nature (N-EWN) and Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS), she works on enhancing equity in decision-making by incorporating local needs and knowledge systems into water infrastructure management in the US. Katie received her PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology from the University of Georgia in 2023. Her doctoral research examined mining conflicts in the Peruvian Andes and the translation (or variable enactment) of international Indigenous rights laws on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. She has also written on climate policy, smallholder inclusion in agricultural value chains, third-party environmental certifications, invasive species interactions, and other areas related to the human dimensions of conservation and dynamic social-ecological systems.

k.gibson@uga.edu

Danielle Jensen-Ryan

Danielle’s doctoral research focused on the science-policy interface and the formal and informal factors which influence the extent to and ways in which science is used to shape environmental policy decisions. To address this research topic, Danielle carried out her doctoral research in Georgia exploring how water policy decisions are made and the dynamics of the science-policy interface. Danielle went on to a post-doctoral position with the Bioenergy Alliance of the Northern Rockies (BANR) at the University of Wyoming, where she analyzed the sociocultural and ecological sustainability of beetle-killed and other forest biomass as a bioenergy feedstock for the renewable energy industry. She now works as a Research Scientist at the University of Wyoming.

Suneel Kumar

Suneel Kumar received his Ph.D. in Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology in August, 2025. Dr. Kumar's dissertation explored the making of the Indus Delta through geological, historical and relational processes. Situated at the confluence of the sediment-rich Indus River and the erosive Arabian Sea, the ancient Indus Delta emerges through continuous riverine and marine processes, where soil accretion and erosion together shape and reshape its landscape. The lives and relations of human and other-than-human beings have long been intertwined with these dynamic processes. Over the past century, however, large-scale colonial and postcolonial infrastructures have profoundly altered soil accretion patterns, intensifying marine erosion and transforming the once-fertile Indus Delta into a shrinking marine delta. Suneel's dissertation adopts an ethnographic, multidisciplinary, and deep-time approach to examine how processes of soil erosion and accretion configure the delta’s landscapes, ecologies, and multispecies relations. Combining historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and ecological observation, it juxtaposes pre-infrastructure hydrological flows with the altered conditions produced by modern river management, demonstrating how infrastructures disrupt sediment dynamics and hydrological regimes and, in so doing, reconfigure the social and ecological fabric of the delta. Challenging the colonial hydrological division that privileges upstream flows while devaluing downstream discharge as “wastewater,” the study also foregrounds non-scalar, multispecies relations and entangled temporalities to advance a more-than-human understanding of riverine and deltaic life.

suneel.kumar@uga.edu

Lindsey Popken

Lindsey Popken (she/her) was a PhD student in Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology. Broadly, she is interested in emerging spaces of Indigenous-led ecological governance and how they challenge Settler-State sovereignty and reaffirm Indigenous self-determination. Lindsey plans to co-develop and co-conduct research with Northern Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations on the West Coast of Vancouver Island in Canada, looking at how resurgent Nuu-chah-nulth-led sea otter harvesting envisions alternatives to current Canadian-led sea otter governance that are rooted in Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, values, and histories. She is also interested in the ways in which sea otter harvesting is an enactment of Indigenous food sovereignty, and how the ontological assumptions that underly Indigenous and Canadian visions for ecological governance interact in conservation and governance practices.