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Unruly Environments: Ecologies of Agency in the Global Era

Conference

13.02.2014 – 14.02.2014

Organized by:  by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society

Hosted by: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India, and the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore, India

Location: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India

Conveners: Siddhartha Krishnan, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment; Bangal Mahesh Rangarajan, Director, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Delhi University; Christof Mauch, Director, Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society, Ludwig- Maximilians University, Munich; Christopher L. Pastore, University of Montana; Samuel Temple, University of Oklahoma

Conference Abstract

This workshop aims to historicize and theorize “unruly environments”—those unwanted, unproductive, and difficult to control spaces that both attract and repel human efforts to transform them. Far from dwindling away in the modern era, these un-mastered places are proliferating, in scholarship as in the world at large. As unruly geographies and ecologies (such as estuaries, oceans, marshes, grasslands, mountains, and deserts), they frustrate efforts of social and environmental control. As territorial borderlands, they facilitate unexpected cultural exchange, migration, and material flows. As transformed and built landscapes, they generate new forms of risk and regulation. Bringing together scholars from across the globe, we hope to foster an international and interdisciplinary discussion on the past, present, and future of these unruly environments.

In reflecting on the challenges unruly environments pose—epistemic as well as practical—the workshop seeks to chart new avenues of inquiry in the basic question of environmental agency and its role in human affairs. How do these complex places affect change at multiple scales from the local to the national and global? How do “extreme” qualities — such as salinity, aridit altitude, wetness, openness, barrenness, or unpredictability—themselves mold economies, institutions, and identities? In short, can we talk meaningfully about non-human agency, both within and among our disciplines and fields of study?

Planned as a two-day workshop in New Delhi, India, the conference seeks papers of theoretical originality, interpretive creativity, and empirical depth from all corners of the globe.

Pre-circulated papers of roughly 5,000-6,000 words will address the following questions:

• When and why do environments come to be typified as unruly?
• In what ways are these fluid, changing states of unruliness specific in time and space?

This conference is for invited participants only.

View the program (333, KB)