I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University of Texas at Austin.

 

I finished my PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of California Irvine. In my dissertation project, I showed that the shifting boundaries of land and water at the coast demand new ways of thinking about labor, environment, and value. I drew on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic research with fishing communities, coastal residents, environmental activists, and bureaucrats in Chennai, India as they face twin crises of sea-level rise and massive industrial infrastructure building on the coast. My research was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and intramural grants at UCI; my university profiled some of my work here. I am now working on publishing articles and a book based on this work. 

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I spend much of my time reading and writing about how people think about and respond to environmental and economic uncertainty and flux. I was drawn to anthropology because I enjoy meeting people and value learning about diverse meanings they hold on any phenomenon. I experiment with storytelling and public writing to convey complex social phenomena in evocative ways.
 

Before this, I got an Integrated Masters in Development Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. I have also worked at development and policy research organizations.

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Email me at oviya.govindan@austin.utexas.edu 
My LinkedIn profile is here.