Dawa Lokyitsang
PhD Candidate
Anthropology

Dawa Lokyitsang is a Tibetan-American Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation is about the establishment of sovereignty in exile by the Tibetan refugee collective following China’s invasion of Tibet in 1959. She looks specifically at the development of Tibetan educational institutions and the making of kinship in India as avenues for securing Tibetan continuity and futurity as the invasion transitioned into a full-scale settler colonial occupation. As such, her scholarship sits at the intersection of Asian imperial-colonialisms, anti-colonial nationalisms, and Indigenous sovereign-futurisms.