Emily Amburgey is a Liu scholar and Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her work is situated at the intersection between International Development and Socio-Cultural Anthropology and surrounds issues of development practice and discourse, ethnic identities, state formation processes, and transnational migration. She engages with digital storytelling methods such as film and photography to highlight issues of social justice, gender, and environmental change.
Emily’s recent work focuses on social change and state restructuring processes in the Himalaya region of Nepal, situated adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. She is continuing to expand on this research and currently investigating the different streams of Nepal’s transnational labor migration. In addition to this, Emily is assisting Dr. Sara Shneiderman (Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at UBC) with the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Expertise, Labour, and Mobility in Nepal’s Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Construction, Finance and Law as Domains of Social Transformation, a multi-disciplinary project addressing Nepal’s ongoing state restructuring and catastrophic earthquakes of 2015.
Emily earned a Research MSc. in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Email: emily.amburgey@ubc.ca