The School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA) welcomes Elsie Lewison as a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Professor Sara Shneiderman (SPPGA; Anthropology). During the term of her appointment, Elsie will be examining how the COVID-19 pandemic is re-shaping agricultural governance strategies, with particular focus on organic agriculture and domestic markets in federal states such as Nepal, India, and Canada.
Elsie holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto where she also served as the Project Manager for a SSHRC Insight Grant titled Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts. Her research builds on approaches from critical development studies and political ecology, employing historical methods, policy analysis and site-based fieldwork to study rural development and agricultural governance. Her work has appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Studies in Nepali History and Society, and The Canadian Geographer among other academic publications. She is looking forward to working with Prof. Shneiderman at SPPGA to pursue this new line of research. She can be reached at elsie.lewison@ubc.ca.
Prof. Shneiderman says “Having worked with Dr. Lewison in depth over the last several years as a Co-Investigator on the Infrastructures of Democracy project, I am thrilled that she will be taking the next steps in her scholarly career with us here at UBC. Her work brings the lived experiences of agricultural transformation in South Asia into conversation with comparative policy analysis in a manner that embodies SPPGA’s objectives.”
