2023

In this Environmental Humanities Lecture, anthropologists Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, and Radhika Govindrajan, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle,  present their research on human-animal relationships, climate change, and religious ecology in India. What form might the environmental humanities take if considered from the place of the Indian Himalaya?

In the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion, a great divergence appeared between the medical opinions of the East and West on the long-term consequences on public health. In this keynote lecture, Kate Brown, Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives us insight on what these conflicting stories can tell us about how Western and Soviet scientists understood humans and the ecologies in which they lived.

This lecture has unfortunately been cancelled. 

What would it mean to tell the stories of trees? How can we represent them in ways that do not rely on problematic forms of ventriloquism, which reinscribe inequalities, and which do not rely on various forms of empathy or sympathy? This talk by Dalia Nassar, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, aims to outline a theory of representation that aims to respond to these questions in relation to trees.

In this talk, Stuart Earle Strange, assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, will explore the contradictions between law, sovereignty, animal agency, and the sacred in Singaporean wildlife conservation.

In this talk, professor of philosophy, Alejandra Mancilla, asks who should be the political representatives in a place with no human inhabitants, namely, Antarctica. While the Antarctic Treaty has been celebrated as a successful legal instrument for the protection of the continent, some have criticized its elitist nature and demanded a more democratic system of governance. But, should only humans be part of this arrangement? Why not penguins and maybe icebergs too?

The whale is held to have great symbolic meaning, as an environmental emblem, as food, as tourist attraction, and more. In Andenes, Vesterålen, two anthropologists, Britt Kramvig and Sadie Hale talk about their search for different kinds of whales and the particular ways that the whale-as-symbol is contested in this place.