Photo from Rara, Lake, Mugu - Heading across the lake to discuss with locals about infrastructure development impact on environmental conditions in the area

Between 2015-2024, I was a Research Assistant for a SSHRC project called Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts. 

Snippets from the website follow (cited with permission). Please refer to the website for the full description and the knowledge dissemination outputs.

 The project consisted of several nested scales of collaboration. The core research teams are "based at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (co-PIs and affiliated doctoral students) and at the Martin Chautari Research and Policy Institute in Kathmandu, Nepal (Research Fellow and Tribhuvan University doctoral students). Two peer researchers participate from three district-scale research sites in Nepal. A group of prominent scholars and policy makers in Canada and Nepal serve as collaborators to the research in an advisory capacity.

Launched in 2015 [and concluded in March 2025], Infrastructures of Democracy employs comparative ethnographic methods and deliberative public engagement to explore how people enact and participate in ‘democracy’ in contexts of governmental transition. Following the end of a decade-long civil conflict, local institutions emerged as key sites of on-going struggle over democratic futures in Nepal. Much of those struggles are waged around the governance of infrastructure development, in a country characterized by challenging topographies and smallholder agrarian livelihoods...

In addition to academic contributions, the project aims to participate in democratic state building by providing policy-relevant analysis of local institutional dynamics, and by supporting processes of public reflection and deliberation through a series of analysis workshops and community-based research methods." 

A school in Mugu that many students spend hours a day one direction to reach to  it. 

I assisted with Liaising with scholars and policymakers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Nepal to develop research tools for community development teams and used software to code complex data. I also created methodological guides for co-research and assisted with facilitating policy development discussions and workshops between academic and government-related spaces in both Canada and Nepal.