Biography

Nadine Plachta is a FAS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography and Planning. Her work focuses on social and cultural transformations in contemporary Nepal and, in particular, the use of citizenship and belonging as a resource for governance and economic development. She has explored this theme in the context of infrastructural politics, natural resource conflicts, landscape transformation, and the construction of local ecological knowledge. Her most recent research explores how borderland communities reassess their expectations of the future within recurring situations of disaster and crisis. Her scholarship is based on long-term ethnographic engagement in South Asia and, especially, in Nepal where she lived and worked for Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute for five years (2014–2019). Nadine is also Editorial Team Member of the online journal Roadsides, as well as Book Reviews Editor of Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.

Research Interests

Citizenship and belonging
Development and landscape transformation
Disasters, crisis, and climate change vulnerabilities
Emerging environmentalisms
Infrastructural politics
Borders and borderlands

Regional specialization: Nepal, Northern South Asia

Education

PhD Global Studies, University of Bern
MA Social Anthropology, Heidelberg University
BA Religious Studies, Heidelberg University