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Research

Professor Fox-Knudtsen’s current research traces aluminum’s global supply chains from consumer goods, military technologies, and green-energy infrastructure to Highland Odisha’s water-bearing mountain summits, where bauxite, the ore used to produce aluminum, is extracted. Her research grows from relationships cultivated since 2013 through sustained intellectual collaboration with Jhrnia and Kondh Ādivāsī (indigenous) partners and close engagement with the nonhuman beings who inhabit and shape the region’s mountain and waterscapes. Professor Fox-Knudtsen’s fieldwork also includes managers and social-responsibility personnel in multinational mining companies, state officials, and regional NGO staff. Across community and institutional settings, she examines how mountain territories understood within Jhrnia thought and practice as homeland, living ancestor, sovereign, and deity are also constituted as mineral resources.

Working from Ādivāsī logics and practices as sources of theory, Professor Fox-Knudtsen argues that resource frontiers are also religious frontiers. She investigates how struggles over extraction remake the categories of religion, superstition, nature, culture, and the secular through which knowledge and claims acquire authority. By examining the constitution of mineral value alongside religious difference, her scholarship connects resource-making to the formation of political subjects, asking who can claim a future and who bears obligations to sustain life. Her multispecies approach examines how social relations extend beyond the human, questioning who participates in collective life and how the terms of belonging are established and transformed.

Professor Fox-Knudtsen conducts immersive ethnographic fieldwork primarily in the Odia and Kui/Kubi languages. She complements ethnography with visualization analysis of satellite imagery to trace landscape change over time and with hydrological research to follow water flows across mining and administrative boundaries. Reading environmental measurements alongside ethnographic accounts of aspiration, dispute, and alliance, she investigates how extraction’s ecological reach is experienced through changes in water availability, cultivation, and bodily well-being. The combined methods allow her to follow resource frontiers beyond individual extraction sites and examine how development’s promises and effects unfold at multiple scales.

Professor Fox-Knudtsen is currently developing this research into a monograph and a series of articles. Keepers of Water: Religiosity, Resources, and Material Ethics in Autochthonous Odisha develops an anthropology of living mountains and extractive governance through obligations linking people, ancestors, eternal names, earth deities, and ecological life. Related articles examine the ontological multiplicity of mountains, the ritual authority of ��é��ū��ī women practitioners, plantation agronomy, and the spatial reach of mining and corporate development.

Training and Research Support

Professor Fox-Knudtsen holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Graduate training encompassed sociocultural anthropology, South Asian history, social-scientific approaches to religion, and Sanskrit language and literature. Her scholarship and research have been materially supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars’ Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and the Social Science Research Council.

Teaching and Mentoring

At the center of Professor Fox-Knudtsen’s pedagogy is the cultivation of an ethnographic imagination: the capacity to question what appears natural or inevitable, approach unfamiliar worlds with humility, connect ordinary experience to global systems, and make visible how power and inequality shape constraint and possibility. Professor Fox-Knudtsen’s courses address environmental anthropology, animism and shamanism, the politics of religion and secularism, natural resources, Indigenous studies, corporate and economic anthropology, the social life of water, shopping and consumption, environmental justice, political economy, and anthropological theory.

Professor Fox-Knudtsen’s teaching pairs theoretical inquiry with practice-based training in the development and conduct of ethnographic research. Students formulate focused questions, design ethically responsible studies, conduct ethnographic, environmental, and multi-specied fieldwork, and develop original analyses grounded in qualitative, visual, and spatial evidence. Projects may incorporate GIS-based spatial analysis, data visualization, digital media, or public-facing scholarship. By presenting research findings to academic, community, and public audiences, students working with Professor Fox-Knudtsen build substantive research portfolios and develop skills relevant to environmental policy and planning, sustainability, nonprofit and community research, public-sector analysis, communications, education, and graduate study.