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Welcome to my website. I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. I work on a range of issues related to frontiers, climate change, and environmental and agrarian change. My most recent book, Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier is published by University of California Press (2025). It is available Open Access, for free.
I an editor of South Asia: The Jouranl of South Asian Studies and part of the Limn Editorial Collective
To learn more about my work, see my current publications, or explore my books below.
I an editor of South Asia: The Jouranl of South Asian Studies and part of the Limn Editorial Collective
To learn more about my work, see my current publications, or explore my books below.
Delta Futures, published in open access and print by University of California Press in 2025, explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta's imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain.
"Jason Cons's ethnography of Bangladesh's Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected 'climate solutions.' This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region's ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future." Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories
"Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being 'captured' by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the 'siltscape' with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book."—Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland
"In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a 'sentinel space' for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it."—Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
"Jason Cons's ethnography of Bangladesh's Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected 'climate solutions.' This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region's ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future." Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories
"Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being 'captured' by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the 'siltscape' with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book."—Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland
"In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a 'sentinel space' for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it."—Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia, co-edited with Michael Eilenberg, is published by Wiley as part of the Antipode Book Series.
Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia. Frontier assemblages are the intertwined cultural, spatial, material, ecological, and political economic processes that produce particular places as resource frontiers at particular moments in time. Contributors offer rich ethnographic and historical studies of both spaces of extraction and production, mapping a set of radical transformations unfolding across Asia. In doing so, they collectively formulate new ways to think about how resource frontiers are made, their implications for those who live and work within them, and their rippling consequences across space and time.
Frontier Assemblages brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists to rethink a set of processes that are reconfiguring millions of people’s relationship to land. In doing so, it opens a set of new conversations about resource frontiers and their relationship to pasts, presents, and futures of economy, ecology, and life in the margins of Asia.
Written for scholars of human geography, political ecology, political and environmental anthropology and more, Frontier Assemblages maps the flows, frictions, interests, materialities and imaginations that accumulate in frontier spaces to transformative effect.
Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia. Frontier assemblages are the intertwined cultural, spatial, material, ecological, and political economic processes that produce particular places as resource frontiers at particular moments in time. Contributors offer rich ethnographic and historical studies of both spaces of extraction and production, mapping a set of radical transformations unfolding across Asia. In doing so, they collectively formulate new ways to think about how resource frontiers are made, their implications for those who live and work within them, and their rippling consequences across space and time.
Frontier Assemblages brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists to rethink a set of processes that are reconfiguring millions of people’s relationship to land. In doing so, it opens a set of new conversations about resource frontiers and their relationship to pasts, presents, and futures of economy, ecology, and life in the margins of Asia.
Written for scholars of human geography, political ecology, political and environmental anthropology and more, Frontier Assemblages maps the flows, frictions, interests, materialities and imaginations that accumulate in frontier spaces to transformative effect.
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Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border was published by University of Washington Press in 2016.
Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging, and control are shown in sharp relief. Through ethnographic and historical analysis, Jason Cons argues that these spaces are key locations for rethinking the production of territory in South Asia today. Sensitive Space examines the ways that these areas mark a range of anxieties over territory, land, and national survival and lead us to consider why certain places emerge as contentious, and often violent, spaces at the margins of nation and state. Offering lessons for the study of enclaves, lines of control, restricted areas, gray spaces, and other geographic anomalies, Sensitive Space develops frameworks for understanding the persistent confusions of land, community, and belonging in border zones. It further provides ways to think past the categories of sovereignty and identity to reimagine territory in South Asia and beyond. "A distinctive and imaginative account of the peculiar and often mystified enclaves or 'fragmented territories' on the border between India and Bangladesh. . . . Cons offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of multiple dimensions of everyday struggles, contestations, and opportunities in Dahagram. . . . Sensitive Space opens new conceptual avenues for analyses on the Indo-Bangladeshi border as well as border studies more generally." -Prithvi Hirani, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography "Cons . . . allows his rich ethnographic material to reveal the complexities of postcolonial sovereignty, insecurity, and precarity. The result is a highly readable, theoretically acute, and sharply insightful work." -Sankaran Krishna, Journal of Asian Studies |
