Saumya Pandey is a doctoral researcher working on sediments of the Himalayan riverine systems. Her research project follows world’s second most sought-after resource, sand, which is central to future-oriented economic structuring.

My doctoral research brings ethnographic study of deep history, science, and political economy to contemporary debates in social and political theory on geological instability. I follow the world’s second most sought after resource, sand, as it erodes, moves, gets transported and extracted from the Himalayan rivers across Nepal mountains and Nepal-India floodplains. I develop new conversations in the study of sovereignty, border-making, and forms of legislating and governing granular particles. Based on 12 months of ethnographic study and six months of archival research, I examine how the sediments’ deep past, materiality and agency are “naturalized” on a day-to-day basis for the prognostication of Nepal’s politics, economy, and sovereignity at a time of melting Himalayan glaciers and rising Bay of Bengal sea levels.

Her research is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

She currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and is an Associate Editor at the Public Anthropologist. You can follow her podcast here: https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/category/puan-podcast/