Shneiderman
Biographic Data
| ID | 56000 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shneiderman |
| FAMILY NAME | Shneiderman |
| SIGNATURE | SHNEIDERMAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1584-6044 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 195 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Can Gen Z Protests Transform Nepal’s Political Futures
In September 2025, Nepal was shaken by youth protests against corruption and nepotism, state violence that left at least 76 people dead, and widespread destruction of infrastructure. The government was dissolved, an interim government was appointed, and elections were called for March 2026. This essay explores how social media became a lifeline for young people in a context of high labor emigration, creating a platform for new political claims, e…
Negotiating expertise in Nepal’s post-earthquake disaster reconstruction
One characteristic feature of post-earthquake recovery in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes was an owner-driven approach to house reconstruction in the most devastated rural regions, which combined a commitment to appropriate technology and building safety. To implement the model, engineering expertise was deployed throughout the affected areas involving over 3000 engineers deployed by the government’s National Reconstruction Authority (NRA). This…
Circular resettlement and ongoing risk: Earthquakes, landslides, and the challenges of “integrated” reconstruction in Nepal
Circular resettlement” can be a sustainable livelihood strategy for disaster-displaced communities. • Community members’ perception of risk in both old/new settlements can contribute to decision-making and governance. • Contemporary resettlement policies are a product of regional political histories, as well as donor-driven intervention. • Resettlement is both a temporal and spatial process. • “Integrated” resettlement policies should proactively…
Places in Knots: Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond
Building a 'cultural city: Heritage, identity, and the politics of reconstruction in Bhaktapur, Nepal
Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes prompted anxious attention to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)-designated World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley and the means and methods for rebuilding damaged monuments and residences. As a value-loaded concept, the debate over 'heritage' today lays bare tensions between the national government and local authorities over the use of foreign experts, building tec…
The state of disaster and resilience literature in British Columbia, Canada. A systematic scoping review
British Columbia (BC), Canada is exposed to diverse natural hazards, leading to extensive research into disaster and resilience topics in the province. However, within disaster studies there is commonly siloing of research and knowledge between different fields, hindering integrated risk reduction solutions. This review aims to summarize the current state of disaster and resilience research in BC to provide context for future innovative research …
The Tin State
What does change look, sound, and feel like? After Nepal's 2015 earthquakes, everything is remade in tin. Walking through this newly reflective landscape, we see how things are transformed in both material and political terms, as post-disaster reconstruction proceeds in tandem with the process of post-conflict federal restructuring. This short piece of flash ethnography takes us beyond the immediate destruction and trauma into the sensory world o…
Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal
What is a house? What about a household? How do they relate to each other? Different answers to these seemingly simple questions lie behind many of the conundrums that Nepali citizens experienced in the process of reconstruction following the country's double earthXuaRes This paper considers whether the widely varying definitions of "house" and "household" used by the Nepali state, the international community, and residents themselves to assess i…
Beyond Reconstruction: What Leads to Satisfaction in Post-Disaster Recovery
On the Subject of Corruption: “Community Contributions” and the Labour of Infrastructural Development in Post-Earthquake Nepal
This piece explores ethnographically how new “subjects” of corruption are formulated through discursive and practical negotiations over the appropriate behaviour of those who would have previously been understood as subalterns. I explore these questions in the context of a reconstruction project in post-conflict, post-earthquake Nepal. Newly rendered as “community members” and “users,” in the language of both governmental and non-governmental age…
House, Household, and Home: Revisiting Anthropological and Policy Frameworks through Postearthquake Reconstruction Experiences in Nepal
Through ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of policy documents about private housing reconstruction in the wake of Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes, we show how the contemporary "house," "household," and "home" are key sites of regulation for the state, as well as for the development and humanitarian organizations that work within it. Our discussion lays bare a more general set of questions about the relationships between these categories th…
The power of Buddhist homelands: Secularism, space and sovereignty
This Afterword draws the essays in this special collection together by highlighting how the ‘Buddhist Homeland’ imaginary can be mobilized to advance the agendas of marginalized communities in non-Buddhist state and diasporic spaces. Buddhist practices and identities may be seen as acceptable forms of counter-hegemonic practice, which are not perceived to challenge sovereignty itself in the way that other forms of mobilization from below may. Thi…
Ethnicity
Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Emerging as an important frame for anthropologica…
Action beyond intent: Experiencing ir/reconciliation (Afterword 2)
The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
Synthesising Practice and Performance, Securing Recognition
This chapter argues that Thangmi individuals from diverse backgrounds in both Nepal and India possess a high level of self-consciousness regarding the differences between fields of ritualised action — such as practice and performance — in which they engage, and that they intentionally choose to deploy different types of action within different social ‘frames’ in order to achieve a range of effects. The chapter defines ‘practice’ and ‘performance’…
Redundancy, Resilience, Repair: Infrastructural Effects in Borderland Spaces
This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of "infrastructural effects" helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in t…
Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal
The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…
Nepal's Ongoing Political Transformation: A review of post-2006 literature on conflict, the state, identities, and environments
This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also add…
Restructuring States, Restructuring Ethnicity: Looking Across Disciplinary Boundaries at Federal Futures in India and Nepal
India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparativ…
Regionalism, mobility, and "the village" as a set of social relations: Himalayan reflections on a South Asian theme
This article considers how ethnographic representations of "the village" have created links between otherwise disparate "regional ethnography traditions" over time. "The village" has served as a multivalent sign that at once works to integrate specific locales into broader scholarly narratives, and to index moments of disjuncture in the production of regionality. I make this argument with specific reference to the relationship between "Himalayan"…
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Himalayan borders of Nepal and India, I revisit disciplinary debates about ethnicity. I focus on the expressive production of ethnic consciousness among members of the Thangmi (Thami) community in a context of high cross-border mobility. I argue that ethnicity is the result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity itself is produ…
Himalayan border citizens: Sovereignty and mobility in the Nepal-Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China border zone
Developing a culture of marginality
This article examines the complex relationships between marginalized communities, the state, and nonstate actors such as development agencies and social scientists in crafting the classificatory regimes that undergird affirmative action policies. Focusing on the current dynamics of "ethnic restructuring" amid the broader political process of postconflict "state restructuring" in Nepal, I suggest that international actors often unwittingly encoura…
Himalayan border citizens: Sovereignty and mobility in the Nepal-Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China border zone
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia? Some scholarly and political considerations across time and space
This article examines the applicability of the Zomia concept for social scientific studies of the Himalayan region, with a focus on the Central Himalayas. While for both empirical and political reasons the term Zomia itself may not be entirely appropriate to the Himalayan Massif, the analytical imperatives that underlie James C. Scott’s usage of it – particularly the emphasis on the ethnic, national, and religious fluidity of highland communities…
Restructuring States, Restructuring Ethnicity: Looking Across Disciplinary Boundaries at Federal Futures in India and Nepal
India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparativ…
Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Himalayan borders of Nepal and India, I revisit disciplinary debates about ethnicity. I focus on the expressive production of ethnic consciousness among members of the Thangmi (Thami) community in a context of high cross-border mobility. I argue that ethnicity is the result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity itself is produ…
The formation of political consciousness in rural Nepal
The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
Relationships, complicity and representation: Conducting research in Nepal during the Maoist insurgency
Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal
The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…
The practices, policies, and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia
This is the introduction to a special section of Focaal that includes seven articles on the anthropology of affirmative action in South Asia. The section promotes the sustained, critical ethnographic analysis of affirmative action measures adopted to combat historical inequalities around the world. Turning our attention to the social field of affirmative action opens up new fronts in the anthropological effort to understand the state by carefully…
House, Household, and Home: Revisiting Anthropological and Policy Frameworks through Postearthquake Reconstruction Experiences in Nepal
Through ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of policy documents about private housing reconstruction in the wake of Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes, we show how the contemporary "house," "household," and "home" are key sites of regulation for the state, as well as for the development and humanitarian organizations that work within it. Our discussion lays bare a more general set of questions about the relationships between these categories th…
Developing a culture of marginality
This article examines the complex relationships between marginalized communities, the state, and nonstate actors such as development agencies and social scientists in crafting the classificatory regimes that undergird affirmative action policies. Focusing on the current dynamics of "ethnic restructuring" amid the broader political process of postconflict "state restructuring" in Nepal, I suggest that international actors often unwittingly encoura…
Regionalism, mobility, and "the village" as a set of social relations: Himalayan reflections on a South Asian theme
This article considers how ethnographic representations of "the village" have created links between otherwise disparate "regional ethnography traditions" over time. "The village" has served as a multivalent sign that at once works to integrate specific locales into broader scholarly narratives, and to index moments of disjuncture in the production of regionality. I make this argument with specific reference to the relationship between "Himalayan"…
Redundancy, Resilience, Repair: Infrastructural Effects in Borderland Spaces
This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of "infrastructural effects" helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in t…
Building a 'cultural city: Heritage, identity, and the politics of reconstruction in Bhaktapur, Nepal
Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes prompted anxious attention to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)-designated World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley and the means and methods for rebuilding damaged monuments and residences. As a value-loaded concept, the debate over 'heritage' today lays bare tensions between the national government and local authorities over the use of foreign experts, building tec…
Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal
What is a house? What about a household? How do they relate to each other? Different answers to these seemingly simple questions lie behind many of the conundrums that Nepali citizens experienced in the process of reconstruction following the country's double earthXuaRes This paper considers whether the widely varying definitions of "house" and "household" used by the Nepali state, the international community, and residents themselves to assess i…
Ethnicity
Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Emerging as an important frame for anthropologica…
Nepali Maoists
Relationships, complicity and representation: Conducting research in Nepal during the Maoist insurgency
Anthropology in a Time of Crisis: A Note from Nepal
The formation of political consciousness in rural Nepal
Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia? Some scholarly and political considerations across time and space
This article examines the applicability of the Zomia concept for social scientific studies of the Himalayan region, with a focus on the Central Himalayas. While for both empirical and political reasons the term Zomia itself may not be entirely appropriate to the Himalayan Massif, the analytical imperatives that underlie James C. Scott’s usage of it – particularly the emphasis on the ethnic, national, and religious fluidity of highland communities…
Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas by Kim Gutschow
Tibetan diary: From birth to death and beyond in a Himalayan valley of Nepal - By Childs, Geoff
Nepal and Bhutan in 2011
Nepal's political transition to a democratic federal republic remains incomplete. A November 2011 agreement on post-conflict integration and rehabilitation offers reason for hope. Continued disagreements over the structure of the federal state and its form of government have delayed the constitution-making process. Corruption, impunity, and weak infrastructure combine to erode Nepali confidence in effective governance. Bhutan's democratic exercis…
Himalayan border citizens: Sovereignty and mobility in the Nepal-Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China border zone
Developing a culture of marginality
This article examines the complex relationships between marginalized communities, the state, and nonstate actors such as development agencies and social scientists in crafting the classificatory regimes that undergird affirmative action policies. Focusing on the current dynamics of "ethnic restructuring" amid the broader political process of postconflict "state restructuring" in Nepal, I suggest that international actors often unwittingly encoura…
The practices, policies, and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia
This is the introduction to a special section of Focaal that includes seven articles on the anthropology of affirmative action in South Asia. The section promotes the sustained, critical ethnographic analysis of affirmative action measures adopted to combat historical inequalities around the world. Turning our attention to the social field of affirmative action opens up new fronts in the anthropological effort to understand the state by carefully…
The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal: Democracy in the MarginsSusanHangen (London: Routledge, 2010)
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Himalayan borders of Nepal and India, I revisit disciplinary debates about ethnicity. I focus on the expressive production of ethnic consciousness among members of the Thangmi (Thami) community in a context of high cross-border mobility. I argue that ethnicity is the result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity itself is produ…
Restructuring States, Restructuring Ethnicity: Looking Across Disciplinary Boundaries at Federal Futures in India and Nepal
India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparativ…
Regionalism, mobility, and "the village" as a set of social relations: Himalayan reflections on a South Asian theme
This article considers how ethnographic representations of "the village" have created links between otherwise disparate "regional ethnography traditions" over time. "The village" has served as a multivalent sign that at once works to integrate specific locales into broader scholarly narratives, and to index moments of disjuncture in the production of regionality. I make this argument with specific reference to the relationship between "Himalayan"…
Nepal's Ongoing Political Transformation: A review of post-2006 literature on conflict, the state, identities, and environments
This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also add…
Synthesising Practice and Performance, Securing Recognition
This chapter argues that Thangmi individuals from diverse backgrounds in both Nepal and India possess a high level of self-consciousness regarding the differences between fields of ritualised action — such as practice and performance — in which they engage, and that they intentionally choose to deploy different types of action within different social ‘frames’ in order to achieve a range of effects. The chapter defines ‘practice’ and ‘performance’…
Redundancy, Resilience, Repair: Infrastructural Effects in Borderland Spaces
This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of "infrastructural effects" helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in t…
Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal
The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…
The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
The power of Buddhist homelands: Secularism, space and sovereignty
This Afterword draws the essays in this special collection together by highlighting how the ‘Buddhist Homeland’ imaginary can be mobilized to advance the agendas of marginalized communities in non-Buddhist state and diasporic spaces. Buddhist practices and identities may be seen as acceptable forms of counter-hegemonic practice, which are not perceived to challenge sovereignty itself in the way that other forms of mobilization from below may. Thi…
Ethnicity
Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Emerging as an important frame for anthropologica…
Action beyond intent: Experiencing ir/reconciliation (Afterword 2)
Beyond Reconstruction: What Leads to Satisfaction in Post-Disaster Recovery
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (14 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works)