Ritodhi Chakraborty

Ritodhi Chakraborty is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography. He has a background in Ecology and Global Environmental Policy and has lived and worked with agrarian communities in the Himalayan region for over five years. He is also a field studies instructor in Bhutan, where he teaches college classes on field research and Himalayan environment and development issues. His project centers on male migrant mountain youth in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. It aims to situate their urban-rural circular migration within the broader contexts of industrial development, livelihood diversification and ecological change. Specifically he is hoping to understand the impacts that these migrant youth networks have on multidimensional resilience of rural communities in the region. Focusing further his goal is to research the role these networks play in the construction of local vulnerabilities to regional climate change. This summer he will be trying to evaluate perceptions of climate vulnerability in different rural communities in two separate districts of the state, living with urban migrant youth from these communities in two provincial cities and interviewing local scientists that are currently working on large federally funded climate risk management projects in the region.