This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
Over the past decades, the Himalayas have witnessed an unprecedented scale of anthropo-genic interventions – primarily hydro projects that often animate and foiled in the ‘green’ language of development. These are usually multiscalar projects involving various stakeholders that operationalise the bureaucratic language of ‘transition’ and ‘sustainability’. The considerable conglomerate is part of these projects that help them realise benefits. However, it introduces new and unique changes to the physical landscape and, as proposed in this paper, to shared ecological sociality. This shared ecological sociality emerges in places and contexts where the natural landscape – consisting of its quotidian non-human and human beings- has lived together. In the emergent climate crisis, the disasters in these ecologies often cascade the effects of their impact.
This paper weaves together narratives of loss from the Himalayan disaster in Uttarakhand. It captures the unsettling and often long-term impact of disasters interspersed with complicated migration, labour, and caste histories. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at various periods between 2021-2023 and through an engagement with emergent scholarship within the region, this paper argues that the emergent crisis of climate change cannot be removed from the localised, place-based anthropogenic intervention, which often cascades the intensity and scale of disaster. Furthermore, the detailed narratives of loss help situate the complex web of shared vulnerability – tied intimately to techno-managerial language that hides the shared ecological sociality.
Biography
Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, Dr Rahul Ranjan was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo Metropolitan University working on the project "The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on The Rights of Rivers", funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Ranjan is an interdisciplinary scholar with a key interest in environmental anthropology and humanities, political ecology and social justice, ethnography, and qualitative methods. Over the decade, Ranjan has ethnographically worked on the longstanding conflict between social movements, Indigenous peoples' struggles, and extraction politics in India. Recently, Ranjan has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in the western Himalayas and conducted a short pilot study and consultation work in Aotearoa New Zealand — exploring countors of river’s rights and community mobilisation.
Ranjan’s long-term research and doctoral work on The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2023. Ranjan is the editor of the volume At the crossroads of Rights (Routledge, 2022). This book demonstrates synergies and distils hard-earned lessons of human and forest rights struggles to inform the ongoing debates on environmental human rights.
READ more: Rahul Ranjan (rahul-ranjan.com)