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From Dust to Dust
Air Pollution and Urban Experience in the Indian Anthropocene
Speaker
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?
This talk will address these questions by situating them within the cultural politics of environment and development.
This session is part of the Let’s Talk Climate Change Talk series.
Presented by:
Speaker
Amita Baviskar
Amita Baviskar is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University, known for her pioneering research on the cultural politics of environment and development in India. Her work spans issues like resource rights, popular resistance, and the social and ecological transformations of urban and rural India. Currently, she is researching food systems and agrarian change in central India and examining the social experiences of air pollution and heat in Delhi.
Baviskar holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. Her influential books include In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley and Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. She has also co-edited Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes and First Garden of the Republic: Nature on the President’s Estate.
A recipient of prestigious accolades like the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences (2010), the VKRV Rao Prize (2008), and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award (2005), Baviskar has been instrumental in shaping environmental sociology and the study of social movements in India.
