Atmaja Gohain Baruah

Joint PhD Researcher at the National University of Singapore and KCL, King's College London
Atmaja Gohain Baruah is a joint PhD student at the Geography Department at KCL and the Department of Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a recipient of the President’s Graduate Fellowship, and her PhD research project focuses on exploring the connection between climate variability, ecological migration and wellbeing in India and China taking an intersectional approach. Her research interests also lie in non-traditional security threats facing the Indo Pacific. She is supervised by Associate Prof Rajesh Rai at NUS and Reader in Environmental Politics Dr Naho Mirumachi at KCL.

Atmaja is associated with the Institute for Security and Development Policy, a Stockholm-based non-profit, non-partisan research and policy organization as an Associated Research Fellow. She is also associated with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a non-profit, scientific research organization focusing on the sustainable use of water and land resources in developing countries. The project fits well with her past experience of conducting policy and political economy analysis in the context of extreme events. Atmaja speaks English, Assamese and Hindi fluently, and is trained in intermediate Mandarin Chinese for her research work.

Thesis title: 'Mobility and Wellbeing in the Context of Climate and Environmental Change in Assam, India, and Yunnan, China—An Intersectional Approach'

Atmaja locates her research interests within the broad spectrum of Sino-Indian relations. As part of her Ph.D., she is focusing on exploring the connection between climate variability, ecological migration and wellbeing in India and China. Besides observing these interconnections across the whole spectrum of context-specific migration, she seeks to inspect the broader institutional responses impacting the risks and vulnerabilities of those already vulnerable and marginalised. Apart from environmental governance in Asia, her research interests also lie in analysing non-traditional security threats facing the Indo Pacific.