Staff profile

Undergraduate study in social anthropology at Cambridge, PhD University of East Anglia Development Studies ‘The Dynamics of Cooperation: Households and Economy in a Tamang Community of Nepal’, lecturing at Edinburgh, Keele, Manchester, Hull, Durham (from 2006), Director of Durham MSc Sustainability, Culture and Development, from 2022 Sustainability, Energy and Development.

ESRC Award 1997-8 ‘Himalayan Biodiversity and Human Interests’.

2002-4 EU award ‘Public Understanding of Genetics’ directed by Jeanette Edwards in Manchester leading workpackage on Public Understanding of Genetically Modified Food.

2007 Williamson Fund award A Himalayan Road and the People of the Border.

2012-13 Co-Investigator Department of Energy and Climate Change ‘Low Carbon Energy for Development Network.

2013-15 Co-Investigator EPSRC/DFID £100,000 'Energy and International Development: Understanding Sustainable Energy Solutions (USES) in Developing Countries Programme'.

Films (with camera by Cosmo Campbell): 2004 ‘Shamanic Pilgrimage to Gosainkund’. 2009 ‘The Way of the Road’.

2024 Herne Katha episode 128 Thade Gaonka Mit Katha

On 2nd November 2024 Herne Katha, a celebrated group of documentary makers from Nepal released a film on You Tube (Herne Katha episode 128) based on a visit to my smallholding in the Pennines in August. In just one week it received one million views. I explain in the film how I have practised vegetable-growing with milking goats and hens, inspired by my years of actual fieldwork in the Himalayas.

My ritual friends (known in Nepali as mit, mitini, or leng and romo in the indigenous Tamang language) came in 1998 to help me build five terraces on the hillside, where I produce potatoes, onions, garlic, turnips, cabbages, cauliflowers, peas and beans, courgettes and squashes, and also Himalayan grains like amaranth. Their friendship and support enabled me to follow multiple research themes in Nepal over the decades, and the practical action of bringing seasonal abundance from the hillside has inspired my research into contemporary challenges of climate disruption and socio-ecological change in the Himalayas (Routledge International Handbook of Himalayan Environments, Development and Wellbeing with co-editors Mary Cameron and Tanka B. Subba, book 9781032586403). Also guiding my teaching on the masters programme in Sustainability, Energy and Development (postgraduate taught courses L6k907).

Thanks to Herne Katha, and thank you Leng and Romo for making it all possible

Future Research Plans

• Biomass to Biogas transition among indigenous communities of Nepal;
• New Directions in UK Sustainable Food Cultures;
• Durham Energy Institute social science of Energy, Environment and Food;
• Low Carbon Energy for Development Network phase II (with colleagues from Loughborough, Sussex, and Imperial College)

International Collaborations

• Britain Nepal Academic Council member

• Low Carbon Energy for Development Network
• European Association of Social Anthropologists
• Commonwealth Climate Resilience Network 

 

 

• Biotechnology and post-agrarian rural economies
• Conservation and social justice
• Culture and sustainability
• Environmental anthropology
• Food cultures
• Indigenous knowledge and development
• Low carbon energy transitions
• Nepal and Himalayas
• South Asia and social theory

Authored book

• Campbell, B. (2013). Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture, and Power in the Himalayas. Oxford University Press

Chapter in book

• Campbell, B. (in press). Biogas in Nepal: A Socio-Technical Perspective of Energy Innovation. In Routledge International Handbook of Himalayan Environments, Development and Wellbeing. Routledge
• Campbell, B., & Suji, M. Biogas in Nepal: bringing social contexts of energy innovation into view. In B. Campbell, M. Cameron, & T. Subba (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Himalayas: Environments, Development, Wellbeings. Routledge
• Campbell, B. Sustainability: a Critical, Comparative and Relational Approach. In Is the Concept of Sustainability Misleading?. Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg
• Campbell, B. (in press). Handbook Introduction: Himalayan Environments, Development and Wellbeing. In B. Campbell, M. Cameron, & T. Subba (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Himalayan Environments, Development and Wellbeing. Routledge
• Campbell, B., Cloke, J., & Brown, E. (2021). Low Carbon Energy Democracy in the Global South?. In A. M. Feldpausch-Parker, D. Endres, T. R. Peterson, & S. L. Gomez (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429402302
• Campbell, B. (2014). Fields of Working Knowledge. In S. K. Chaudhuri, & S. S. Chaudhuri (Eds.), Fieldwork in South Asia : memories, moments, and experiences (106-121). SAGE Publications
• Campbell, B. (2014). Linking Local and Global in the Sustainable Development of Biodiversity Conservation. In P. Sillitoe (Ed.), Sustainable development : an appraisal from the Gulf Region (197-220). Berghahn Journals
• Campbell, B. (2014). Culture on Display: metropolitan multiculturalism and the Manchester Nepal festival. In G. Toffin, & J. Pfaff-Czarnecka (Eds.), Facing globalization in the Himalayas : belonging and the politics of the self (209-232). SAGE Publications
• Campbell, B. (2014). Linking Local and Global in the Sustainable Development of Biodiversity Conservation. In P. Sillitoe (Ed.), Sustainable Development: An Appraisal from the Gulf Region (197-220). Berghahn Journals
• Campbell, B. (2013). From Remote Area to Thoroughfare of Globalisation: Shifting Territorialisations of Development and Border Peasantry in Nepal. In J. Smadja (Ed.), Territorial changes and territorial restructurings in the Himalayas (269-285). Adroit Publishers
• Campbell, B. (2011). Pathways of Place Relation: Moving Contours of Belonging in Central Nepal. In J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, & G. Toffin (Eds.), The politics of belonging in the Himalayas : local attachments and boundary dynamics (222-245). SAGE Publications
• Campbell, B. (2010). How Biotechnology Makes Human Kinship with Wildlife Visible. In M. Bolton, & C. Degnen (Eds.), Animals and Science: from colonial encounters to the biotech industry (196-219). Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Campbell, B. (2010). Beyond cultural models of the environment: linking subjectivities of dwelling and power. In A. Guneratne (Ed.), Culture and the environment in the Himalaya (186-203). Routledge
• Campbell, B. (2010). Subjectivity and Governance in the Himalayan Environment. In M. Lecomte-Tilouine (Ed.), An Exploration of the Categories of Nature and Culture in Asia and the Himalayas (156-189). Social Science Press
• Campbell, B. (2009). Fields of Post-human Kinship. In J. Edwards, & C. Salazar (Eds.), European kinship in the age of biotechnology (162-178). Berghahn Journals
• Campbell, B. (2007). Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe. In P. Wade (Ed.), Race, ethnicity and nation: perspectives from kinship and genetics (95-124). Berghahn Journals
• Campbell, B. (2005). On 'Loving Your Water buffalo More Than Your Own Mother': Relationships of Animal and Human Care in Nepal. In J. Knight (Ed.), Animals in person : cultural perspectives on human-animal intimacies (79 - 100). Berg
• Campbell, B. (2004). Indigenous views on the Terms of Participation in the Development of Biodiversity Conservation in Nepal. In A. Bicker, P. Sillitoe, & J. Pottier (Eds.), Investigating local knowledge : new directions, new approaches (149-168). Ashgate Publishing

Edited book

• Campbell, B., Cameron, M., & Subba, T. (Eds.). (in press). The Routledge Handbook of the Himalayas: Environments, Development, Wellbeings. Routledge

Journal Article

• Campbell, B. (in press). ‘Bringing Commoning Into View: renewable energy innovation as collective practice in a case from Nepal’. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology,
• Boyd Williams, N., Quilliam, R. S., Campbell, B., Ghatani, R., & Dickie, J. (2022). Taboos, toilets and biogas: Socio-technical pathways to acceptance of a sustainable household technology. Energy Research and Social Science, 86, Article 102448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102448
• Boyd Williams, N., Quilliam, R. S., Campbell, B., Raha, D., Baruah, D. C., Clarke, M. L., Sarma, R., Haque, C., Borah, T., & Dickie, J. (2022). Challenging perceptions of socio-cultural rejection of a taboo technology: Narratives of imagined transitions to domestic toilet-linked biogas in India. Energy Research and Social Science, 92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102802
• Campbell, B. (2020). Communicative Orders in Collision and Collusion with Natural Resource Management Regimes in Nepal. Ethnos, 85(1), 79-99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1574854
• Campbell, B. (2018). Biodiversity, Livelihoods and Struggles over Sustainability in Nepal. Landscape Research, 43(8), 1056-1067. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2018.1503241
• Campbell, B. (2018). Moral Ecologies of Subsistence and Labour in a Migration-affected Community of Nepal. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24(S1), 151-165. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12805
• Brown, E., Campbell, B., Cloke, J., To, L. S., Turner, B., & Wray, A. (2018). Low carbon energy and international development: from research impact to policymaking. Contemporary Social Science, 13(1), 112-127. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.1417627
• Campbell, B. (2017). Encountering Climate Change: dialogues of human and non-human relationships within Tamang moral ecology and climate policy discourses. European bulletin of Himalayan research, 49, 59-87
• Campbell, B., Cloke, J., & Brown, E. (2016). Communities of Energy. Economic Anthropology, 3(1), 133-144. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12050
• Campbell, B., & Sallis, P. (2013). Low-carbon yak cheese: transition to biogas in a Himalayan socio-technical niche. Interface Focus, 3(1), Article 20120052. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2012.0052
• Campbell, B. (2010). Rhetorical Routes for Development: a road project in Nepal. Contemporary South Asia, 18(3), 267-279. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2010.501099
• Campbell, B. (2008). Environmental Cosmopolitans: Introduction. Nature and Culture, 3(1), 9-24. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2008.030102
• Campbell, B. (2005). Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement. Conservation & Society, 3(2), 280-322
• Campbell, B. (2005). Biotechnology and the Public Voices of Market Reason in the British Debate on GMOs. Biotecnologia i veus públiques de raons de mercat en el debat britànic sobre organismes genèticament modificats (OGM). Revista d'etnologia de Catalunya (Internet), 27, 24-39