Room S5, Maison de la paix, Geneva Graduate Institute
The Joint ANSO / IHP Tuesday Seminars series is co-organized by the Anthropology and Sociology and International History and Politics Departments at the Institute to discuss global questions from historically and ethnographically-informed perspectives.
Situated on the hot and dry north Indian plains, the city of Delhi has always lived with dust. But in the last three decades, dust has transformed into a problem: air pollution. In the world's most polluted capital city, debates about dust rise and subside like seasonal storms, never quite becoming a public priority. Why? Despite its severe impacts on health, why does air pollution become yet another element in a deteriorating urban environment to be borne and lived with, rather than a public emergency that calls for urgent and drastic action? My talk will address these questions by situating them within a cultural politics of environment and development.
Amita Baviskar is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University. Her research addresses the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. Currently, she is working on food and changing agrarian environments in central India and studying the social experience of air pollution and heat in Delhi. Baviskar received a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. Her books, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (1995) and Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi (2020), and other writings explore the themes of resource rights, popular resistance and discourses of environmentalism. Her recent publications include the edited books Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray) and First Garden of the Republic: Nature on the President’s Estate. Baviskar’s contributions to developing the field of environmental sociology in India and to the study of social movements have received peer recognition. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.
The Joint ANSO / IHP Tuesday Seminars is a regular series of discussions co-organized by the International History and Politics and Anthropology and Sociology Departments at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies to discuss a variety of global questions from a multiplicity of historically and ethnographically-informed perspectives.
The Seminars take place every Tuesday from 16:15 to 18:00 in Seminar Room 5 (S5) at the Graduate Institute (Maison de la paix), and are followed by an apero open to the attending public. Connect to this week's seminar online using the event password p4Xp2EexMM2.