Rachel Kay is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is currently carrying out long-term ethnographic fieldwork with people who live alongside Kyrgzystan’s walnut forests and participate in the walnut trade. She is interested in how working lives in this context are shaped by the intersection of ecological change and political economy in Central Asia.

At Cambridge, Rachel is supervised by Dr Andrew Sanchez and is also supported by the interdisciplinary Cambridge Central Asia Forum. Her PhD research is funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Rachel is very much looking forward to meeting and collaborating with colleagues at UCA.