EMILY T. YEH

Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She conducts research on nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, conflicts over access to natural resources, vulnerability of Tibetan herders to climate change, indigenous knowledge, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, environmental history, and emerging environmental subjectivities.  She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press 2013), which explores the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization, as well as a co-editor with Chris Coggins of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, and with Kevin O’Brien and Ye Jingzhong of Rural Politics in Contemporary China. For her curriculum vitae and publications, please click here

Kunga Lama is a Tibetan-American, born and raised in Nepal and India, now residing in Boulder, Colorado and working as a Registered Nurse. For his MA in anthropology, he did research that explored the political economy and cultural practices surrounding the harvesting of Cordyceps (yartsa gunbu, or caterpillar fungus), a prized commodity in major Chinese cities which grows on the Tibetan plateau. Kunga has also co-written an award-winning essay about hip-hop and race among Tibetans in the US, and studied Chinese (Mandarin) for two years as a graduate student. Besides his native language of Tibetan, Kunga speaks English, Hindi, and Nepali fluently. An avid filmmaker, Kunga has also worked as a teaching assistant, and a Tibetan language tutor, and has served on the board of the Tibetan Association of Colorado several times.