Rachel Kay

Rachel Kay is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Her research addresses experiences of uncertainty and time among walnut traders in Central Asia, asking how these are produced by shifting political economies and ecologies. For this project, she carried out long-term ethnographic research with people involved in the transnational trade of walnuts from forests in the Jalal-Abad region of Kyrgyzstan. She is interested in what it means to live with ambiguous plants, approaching this question through a methodological focus on emotional life.