Monica Ogra PhD » Team

Monica Ogra is an interdisciplinary, mixed methods researcher with a background in feminist political ecology, cultural anthropology, and animal geographies.  She is keenly interested in the places and spaces where animal studies, environmental sustainability, and equity/ethics/advocacies meet, both materially and discursively.

As a conservation social scientist, her scholarship focuses primarily on challenges related to human-wildlife conflict & coexistence and the politics of protected area-based conservation in India – with a goal of helping to promote equitable and ethical approaches to sustainable development and species coexistence more generally.  For over 20 years, she has been conducting research on the gender, equity, and “hidden cost” dimensions of biodiversity and wildlife conservation.

She also maintains an active interest in debates about “rewilding” and related co-existence interventions, especially in relation to the need for more just and compassionate forms of conservation practice.  In this context, she is currently working with a team of Gettysburg College students to study trends in the discursive narratives found in newsmedia reporting about the ongoing wolf (and soon to be wolverine) reintroductions in the state of Colorado.

In addition, as her research and teaching work has turned more directly to the lives of individual (nonhuman) animals themselves, her theoretical engagements increasingly foreground multispecies justice, care work, and continuing questions about the ethics of animal labor, display, and captivity. By materially and affectively centering the lifeways/deathways of captive elephants in India and captive-bred wolfdogs in the United States as primary lenses, she is conducting research about commodification of “the wild” and what this means for the nonhuman animals caught up in complex human networks of representational and cultural politics, institutions, trade pathways, rescue and sanctuary-based practices, love, grief, and other such arenas.  Her related envisioned book project, Labors of Love, is in progress.

She has throughout her career been a passionate advocate for improving the recognition, visibility, and institutionalization of Animal Studies an academic field of study and fruitful arena for social change. In 2008 she and fellow PANWorks member Julie Urbanik co-founded the Animal Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG); in 2018, they co-edited a special issue of Society & Animals that sought to track and highlight new insights about the human/wildlife/conservation nexxus in across various disciplines that are often scattered across the human-animal studies landscape. She currently serves as Professor of Environmental Studies at Gettysburg College (USA), where she strives to offer a rich undergraduate curriculum about people’s relationships to other animals, nonhuman ‘nature’, and to each another.