Dr Sahil Nijhawan

Sahil is an engineer turned conservation anthropologist who has worked in Latin America, Southern Africa and India. He is easily excited by big cats, camera trapping methods, animism and shamanism, ritual ecologies, and locally-led conservation. Methodologically, he embeds ecological methods and newer technologies within traditional ethnography and indigenous approaches. Over the past decade, he has worked with and alongside the Idu Mishmi people of Arunachal Pradesh (Northeast India) - a journey that began with his doctoral research in 2012, which studied socio-cultural, ecological and political relations between the Idu Mishmi and tigers. Future multi-sited work will investigate the factors that lead to local conservation in rapidly changing ethnic Northeast India. Sahil is passionate about research capacity building in indigenous northeast India and collaborating with local people, artists and educators towards inclusive, decolonised and reflexive approaches to conservation research and practice. Sahil is part of a team of Idu Mishmi people working on a range of locally-led initiatives towards rights-based, ethical bio-cultural conservation and research. He is a Future Leaders Fellow at the Zoological Society of London and University College London, Scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation, and a member of the Coexistence Consortium and the ICCA Consortium.