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Prash Naidu
Assistant Professor, Historical and Political Studies
Easton Hall 234 1 (215) 572-2925 Fall 2019: WED 2-3:30PM & TH 4-5:30PM or by appointment
About Me
Areas Of Focus
Political Ecology; Environmental anthropology; Air/olfactory Pollution and Extractive Industries; Phenomenology; Sensory studies; Semiotics; Geospatial environmental mapping; Asia Pacific.
Home Country
Singapore
Education History
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2019
PhD, Major in Sociocultural Anthropology
University of Chicago 2011
Research Summary
Prash Naidu (PhD, 2019, University of Michigan) is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on the embodied, sensory experience of environmental change and extractive development in Timor-Leste and the Pacific Rim. Broadly, he examines landscape transformations and atmospheric pollution caused by natural resource extraction and traces their impacts on people and ecosystems. He has published "Sensing Change, Changing Place: Sensory Politics Along the Tasi Mane, Timor-Leste" in The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 19(5): 467-483, 2018. DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2018.1513552
Naidu's research uses community-driven, citizen-science methods (GIS-GPS technologies, pollution diaries, and citizen sensing) to map olfactory and sonic pollution. His goal is to use data from citizen-science projects to intervene in the global endeavor to document evanescent forms of industrial pollution and inform future pollution regulation policies. He is also beginning a new multi-sited, ethnographic project that examines sand mining, the global commons, and climate change in the Pacific Rim.