Congratulations to Amy Johnson, ABD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Yale University, who has been selected to receive the 2020 David M. Schneider Award from the American Anthropological Association. This award is given each year to a graduate student in anthropology in recognition of innovative work in the fields of kinship, culture theory, and American culture. Amy won this award for her paper titled “Tharu-Pahadi Bhai-Bhai: Equality, Intimacy, and Exogamy in the New Nepal.”
Amy successfully defended her dissertation, “State Re-Making: Federalism, Environment, and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Nepal” in June 2020. She is a socio-cultural and environmental anthropologist with training in geography and historical methods. Her research takes place in Nepal, where she is interested in the ways environmental relations and histories of environmental difference shape constitution-writing and federal design in a newly minted federal democratic republic. Her ongoing research program investigates the post-state imaginaries enfolded in political responses to global climate change, concentrating on South Asia.