Amit Kaushik

Amit Kaushik is a Ph.D. candidate in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology at the University of Georgia. Kaushik’s research broadly examines the social, political, ecological, and more-than-human dimensions of conservation, with particular attention to how interventions involving large carnivores reshape relations among humans, nonhuman species, and landscapes. His dissertation investigates conservation initiatives in central India that seek to restore big cats such as tigers and cheetahs while transforming ecological governance, livelihoods, and multispecies coexistence. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, political ecology, caste, and the anthropology of science and technology, he explores what these conservation projects reveal about the production of environmental knowledge, the politics of expertise, and the unequal making of conservation futures. Through long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research with conservation scientists, Forest Department officials, local communities, and the movements of wolves and tigers themselves, Kaushik examines how conservation science, state governance, and ecological practices reconfigure relations of care, authority, and difference across species in changing times.