Ru-Yu Lin (林汝羽) is a PhD student from Taiwan. She joined the IDS in February 2018, supervised by Professor Lyla Mehta and Dr Lars-Otto Naess. Her research looks at the perception of nature from spirituality to resource, emotional and institutional responses to environmental change, discussing values, justice, and health in local social process impacted by climate change. She has been working for years with a few transboundary pastoralist communities in the post-conflict borderland of the Asian highland (Eastern Himalaya, Arunachal Pradesh).

She currently works part-time with the ICTD on fishery tax in Africa, and among the SSRP on a ICDF funded research of sustainable forest (Yunnan, China). She has published widely on refugee issues and lived experiences of the displaced Tibetan in India. Before returning to academia in 2016, she worked for years as a language teacher and ethnographer in South Asia. She has led a few educational programs for marginalized children and youth at remote places, with participatory approaches, community-oriented objects, and adaptive visual tools.

Her research interests are wide and stretching, like her experiences. They include human-nature/non-human interactions, affordability and user interface, hydropower, digital identity and performativity, cross-species communication, nationalism, mental health, attachment/love, practical poetry, food and agrarian transformation. She is a proud adopted daughter of a Tibetan family; fieldwork is never just work for her.

She is interested in development consultancy works with communities and NGOs. She speaks English, Mandarin, French, Tibetan, Hoklo Chinese, and she understands a bit of Hindi and Arabic.