Political Science

Shishav Parajuli earned his doctorate in Political Theory at Brown University. His dissertation is an exploration of multispecies politics— intersecting the concerns of posthumanism and those of the environmentalism of the poor. Shishav’s work grows out of his attention to the buffer zones of national parks across the southern borders of Nepal, and explicates the complexities of living at porous margins— those between nation-states as well as across human-nonhuman divide. Using native megafauna like elephants, microfauna like mosquitos, surviving old trees, extinction-facing deities etc., his work catalogues historical coexistences, alliances, and struggles within and across species lines, not only to reveal the morethanhuman communities that are lost to the tunes of modernity but also how the past continue to shape the present times. Working to reconfigure political concepts and institutions that takes into account the presence, labor, and agency of nonhuman beings/things, Shishav’s work takes a comparative theoretical approach, and is rooted in global indigenous and nonwestern perspectives and life-worlds.