Amy Leigh Johnson
Assistant Professor
Department of Government and Sociology
Georgia College and State University
Email: amy.johnson@gcsu.edu
@amyleigh_j
Bio
Amy Leigh Johnson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Georgia College and State University. Her research focuses on the everyday experience of environmental and political change in South Asia, with a particular focus on lowland environments within the Nepal Himalaya. Using a person and place-entered ethnographic approach, Amy is interested in the gradual seditimization of political and environmental changes in social life as a way to ground theorisation of rural futures in South Asia. Amy completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Anthropology from Yale University in December 2020 and is a graduate of Yale's Combined Degree in Anthropology and the School of the Environment. She was formerly a Research Fellow at Northumbria University's Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences.
Latest Publication
"Hiding in Sight: The Eco-Social Mobilities of Women's Worlds in Small Town Nepal"
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2024, 25(5): 372-393
NADEL ESSAY PRIZE 2024
The article explores intersecting conceptual and physical fields through an ethnography of acts of lukne, or hiding, performed by women during seasonal grass-cutting excursions in a small town located in Nepal’s Far Western Tarai. Women’s physical work performed in agricultural fields, and especially grass-cutting excursions, afforded possibilities for women to construct private worlds as spaces of female agency. As the article unpacks the locality’s gendered environments and explores the eco-social rhythms that shape women’s movements, it simultaneously grapples with the place of hiding in women’s daily activities and in the interplay between agricultural and ethnographic fields. In doing so, it reflects on the ecology underlying ethnographic practice and the hidden worlds of women’s fieldwork, and engages fields as moral and material spaces mediating relationships between ethnographic practice and the intersubjective worlds built by ethnographers and people in places of research.
Keywords:
Environment; Gender; Mobility; Agency; Nepal; Tarai
