Jason Cons
Associate Professor — PhD, Cornell University

Contact
- E-mail: jasoncons@utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 232-3832
- Office: WCP 5.138
- Campus Mail Code: C3200
Interests
Borders, security, climate change, agrarian change, development, political ecology, South Asia, Bangladesh
Biography
Jason Cons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on borders in South Asia, climate and agrarian change, and rural development. He has conducted extensive research in Bangladesh on a range of issues including: climate security, disputed territory along the India-Bangladesh border, the impacts of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas, and the politics of development. His current research is situated in the Sundarbans and the Southwest Delta region of Bangladesh. Addressing climate change related development, conservation, industrialization, piracy, and security, it explores the ways that imaginations of future climate change are shaping the delta and the India-Bangladesh border in the present.
Cons’s first book, Sensitive Space: Anxious Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. It explores questions of territory, belonging, and borders through an ethnography of enclaves (pieces of India inside of Bangladesh and vice versa) along the India-Bangladesh border. More recently, he is the co-editor of a volume titled Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia for Wiley’s Antipode Book Series and of Limn 10: Chokepoints. He is an associate editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies and his work has appeared in Antipode, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography, Ethnos, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, SAMAJ, and Third-World Quarterly.
Cons teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the anthropology of the state, political ecology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of security, social theory, and the anthropology of development. You can find more of his work at: jasoncons.net.
Cons currently works with the following graduate students:
- As Chair: Shehzad Arifeen, Sarah Eleazar (co-chair), Christopher Haley, Kenza Yousfi
- As Committee Member (Sociocultural Anthropology): Danielle Good, Sam Law, Sabrina Lileby, Kate Maddox, Megan McQuaid, Daniel Ng
- As a Committee Member (other Anthropology Sub-fields): Emmy Dawson (Archeology), Anya Gruber (Archeology), Domenic Romanello (Biological Anthropology)
- As a Committee Member (other departments): Samira Bashar (Community & Regional Planning), Gerónimo Berrera (Latin American Studies), Angeliz Encarnacion (Community & Regional Planning), Alexandra Lanina (Latin American Studies and Community & Regional Planning), Vrinda Marwah (Sociology), Beth Prosnitz (Sociology), Stephen Zigmund (Community & Regional Planning)