Karlie Fox-Knudtsen
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Joined Connecticut College: 2026
Education
Natural Resources, Extraction, and Green-Energy Transitions
Anthropology of Religion and Secularism
Indigeneity and Sovereignty
Water and Hydrosocial Relations
Anthropology of Corporations, Development, and Political Economy
South Asian Studies
Karlie Fox-Knudtsen is a sociocultural anthropologist working across environmental and multispecies anthropology, political economy, indigenous studies, and the anthropology of religion and secularism. Her research follows planetary transformations, especially shifting climatic conditions and the green-energy transition, from global policy and commodity markets into particular landscapes, communities, and the texture of ordinary life. By tracing familiar commodities and technologies to the places and people involved in their production, her research renders large and often alienating systems comprehensible at the scale of lived experience.
What makes a mountain a mineral reserve rather than an ancestor, sovereign, or living territory? Who gains the authority to define what a landscape is, and how are competing claims negotiated and contested? More broadly, she asks how classifications of religion, resource, territory, and development shape what counts as environmental risk, which people and places receive protection, whose claims are recognized, and how opportunities are distributed.
Contact Karlie Fox-Knudtsen
Mailing Address
Karlie Fox-Knudtsen
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Ave.
New London, CT 06320
Research
Her long-term fieldwork in highland Odisha, India, is conducted in the Odia and Kui/Kubi languages and grounded in sustained intellectual collaboration with Jhrnia Adivāsi research partners. She traces the aluminum used in soda cans, car bodies, solar-panel frames, electrical systems, and military technologies to Highland Odisha’s water-bearing mountains, where bauxite—the ore used to produce aluminum—is mined. In Jhrnia thought and practice, mountain territory is at once homeland, ancestor, sovereign, and deity. Mining companies and state agencies classify the same mountains as mineral deposits and sources of economic value.
Following the bauxite–alumina complex across Jhrnia communities, state agencies, mining corporations, and development organizations, she examines how competing claims about living territory and mineral wealth are negotiated, which claims acquire institutional authority, and how institutional decisions distribute environmental risk and material opportunity. From Highland Odisha, the green-energy transition comes into view as a struggle over what mountains are, what futures they can sustain, and who may decide.
Her broader intervention is to show how natural resources are made rather than simply found. The classifications that define a mountain as a resource also define relations with that mountain as religion, culture, or superstition. Resource frontiers, in other words, are also religious frontiers. Working from Jhrnia thought and practice, she analyzes living territory alongside mineral value, treating extraction as a question of knowledge and authority as much as material transformation.
Bauxite frontiers are not only sites of environmental change. They are also fields of aspiration, disagreement, negotiation, and alliance. Methodologically, she combines multispecies ethnography with GIS-based spatial analysis of satellite imagery and hydrological research to follow institutional negotiations over resource value alongside changes in landscapes and everyday life. Across her work, she asks what competing ways of valuing mountains reveal about collective life and the place of humans within wider ecological and cosmological worlds.
Training and Current Work
She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she trained in sociocultural anthropology and South Asian history. She holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, with training in social-scientific approaches to religion and Sanskrit language and literature. Her research has received support from 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.
She is developing her first monograph, Keepers of Water: Religiosity, Resources, and Material Ethics in Autochthonous Odisha, an anthropology of living mountains, extractive governance, and more-than-human obligation. Related articles examine mountains as ontologically multiple, béjūnī women’s ritual authority, plantation forestry, and the spatial reach of mining and corporate development.
Teaching and Mentoring
Students in her courses learn anthropology by doing it. Courses on environmental anthropology, natural resources, water, consumption, environmental justice, political economy, and anthropological theory pair conceptual depth with practice-based training in ethnographic research. Students formulate original questions, design ethically responsible studies, conduct participant observation and interviews, keep systematic fieldnotes, and interpret qualitative, visual, and spatial evidence. Depending on the project, they may combine ethnography with GIS-based spatial analysis, data visualization, digital media, or public-facing scholarship.
By presenting their findings to academic, community, and public audiences, students 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. At the center of her 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 both constraint and possibility.