11 February 2025, 4:00-5:30pm

13 University Square, 0G/010

In this discussion, I present initial insights from a photography collaboration with high-altitude guides and porters that offers perspectives of changes to everyday life, aspirations and environmental knowledge in the Himalayan Khumbu (Everest) region in Nepal. This visual collaboration is part of a long-term ethnography of tourism, economic and social change across three generations of Everest workers. In the first half of the discussion, I present an overview of how the history of Chomolungma (Mount Everest) has become inseparable from colonial and imperial conquest and exploration, through technologies of visual culture. I argue that this history has become exacerbated through the implementation of digital infrastructures in the region since 2015 and digital practices that have followed, which have contributed to attracting more commercial mountaineering and trekking tourists, exponentially. In the second half, I detail the ethnographic collaboration with high-altitude guides, where the anthropological knowledge generated (and arguably any knowledge generated) is entirely dependent on regional expertise, routines and practices that are largely overlooked. Collaboration, co-envisioning, and media co-production have generated new ways of imaging futures in the unfolding of Everest tourism, where currently, concerns for environmental degradation and climate change have an uneasy relationship with aspirations for maintaining and expanding opportunities for tourism livelihoods.