Dawa T. Lokyitsang

Dawa Lokyitsang is a Tibetan-American cultural anthropologist who received her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research tracks Chinese colonialism in Tibet and its afterlives in the diaspora, examining Tibetan agency and sovereignty through the 1960s Tibetan-led construction of refugee schools in India, former students’ migration to the West, and their community-building and advocacy networks abroad. She is also the co-founder and editor of Lhakar Diaries (2011-present), a digital space for Tibetan oral histories, critical thought, and ethnographic storytelling.

Project title

Resurgent Tibetan Otherwise Worlds

How can Tibetan experiences and practices help us reimagine crisis, embrace planetary interconnection, and rethink what it means to be human in these catastrophic times in order to rebuild a world habitable for all? This ethnographic book project explores how Tibetan communities in exile have responded to historical trauma and ongoing colonialism with powerful, future-oriented practices of care, education, and solidarity. Following the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet in the 1950s, tens of thousands of Tibetans were forced into exile, fracturing families and displacing entire communities. Yet, in the face of profound loss and dislocation, Tibetans built new worlds — establishing their own schools in India and sustaining transnational kinship networks that continue to thrive across the globe. Based on oral histories from three generations of Tibetan exiles (from the 1960s to the 2000s), this book traces how everyday practices of community care have become acts of anticolonial resistance and ethical worldmaking. Engaging with Black and Indigenous radical thought, Resurgent Tibetan Otherwise Worlds positions Tibetan survival not as passive endurance, but as an insurgent form of relational sovereignty — one that redefines what global solidarity and decolonial futures can look like.

Selected list of publications

1. Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2024. “Kinship Under Colonial Duress: Anti-Colonial Nationalism Mends Ruptured Tibetan Attachments.” Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, ed. Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Sandra Bamford. Rutgers University Press, pp. 99–110.
2. Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2024. “Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity.” Made in China Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 142–147.
3. Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2022. “Sovereignty in Settler Colonial Times: Kinship and Education in the Tibetan Exile Community.” American Ethnological Society website, March 3.
4. Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2020. “The Discursive Art of China's Colonialism: Reconfiguring Tibetan and State Identities.” Tibet Policy Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 29–50.
5. Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2018. “Who Is a Pure Tibetan? Identity, Intergenerational History, and Trauma in Exile.” Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage, ed. Shelly Bhoil and Enrique Galvan-Alvarez. Lexington Books, pp. 195–211.