Biography
Atmaja Gohain Baruah is a joint PhD student at the Department of Geography at King's 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 lies at the intersection of climate change, displacement, and wellbeing, taking an intersectional approach in certain peri-urban and ecologically vulnerable locations of Asia. She is supervised by Associate Professor Rajesh Rai at NUS and Dr Naho Mirumachi, Reader in Environmental Politics at King's.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Atmaja is associated with the Institute for Security and Development Policy, a Stockholm-based non-profit, non-partisan research and policy organisation, as an Associated Research Fellow. Prior to her current role, she has worked with national think tanks and non-profits focusing on strategy-building and resource management within India and globally. Atmaja is a native of Assam, India. She speaks English, Assamese, and Hindi fluently. She has trained in intermediate Mandarin Chinese and Bengali for her research work.
Research
Thesis title: 'Mobility and Wellbeing in the Context of Climate and Environmental Change in Assam, India, and Khulna, Bangladesh—An Intersectional Approach'
As part of her PhD, Atmaja is focusing on exploring the connection between climate variability, migration, and wellbeing in Assam, India and Khulna, Bangladesh, through an intersectional approach. 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. Her research interests also include analysing non-traditional security threats facing the Indo-Pacific through systems thinking.
PhD supervision
- Co-supervisors: Naho Mirumachi and Helen Adams