Contact
Nandita Badami is a cultural anthropologist interested in analyzing the epistemic shifts that develop in the wake of contemporary acts of environmental policymaking. Her current book project examines the conceptual disruptions that accompany infrastructural ones as politicians and policymakers work to deploy solar energy alongside conventional coal-powered electricity in India. Her next project is a history of mitigation as a conceptual object. The project charts the development of mitigation from its etymological roots as “softening” through to its contemporary meaning as a mode of climate action. It will be informed by ethnographic and archival research amongst the spaces and texts of international climate conventions.
Nandita earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and has previously been a postdoctoral scholar at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds two previous degrees in political theory from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Alongside the anthropology of energy, Nandita maintains a keen interest in the intellectual history of environmentalism, particularly when it relates to the histories of economic and political thought.
RCC Research Project: Shadows for Sunlight: Epistemic Experiments with Solar Energy
Selected Publications:
- “Let There Be Light (Or, in Defense of Darkness).” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 51–61.
- “Solarpunking Speculative Futures.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, 18 December 2018. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/solarpunking-speculative-futures.
- “Informality as Fix: Repurposing Jugaad in the Post-crisis Economy.” Third Text 32, no. 1 (2018): 46–54.
- “Counting on Zero: Imaginaries of Energy and Waste in the New Green Economy.” Platypus, 21 October 2016. https://blog.castac.org/2016/10/counting-on-zero/.