Indigenous Asia Initiative presents: Green Courts and the Indigenous Slot in Himalayan Resource Struggles: The Environment as a Metanarrative on April 12, 2022. Prof. Vasan will present an ethnography of a case against a hydel power project in Himachal Pradesh (India) that was taken up in the National Green Tribunal of India. A local community with the support of environmental activists was successful in pausing the expansion of a hydel power project in the Himalayas. She will discuss how opposing sides in the case all relied on a claim to environmentalism to make their case, and the ways in which the indigenous slot played a role in these resource struggles. The broader argument merging from this is that the environment has emerged as a metanarrative of our times.
Date & Time:
April 12 | 6:30pm – 7:30pm (PDT)
Location: online via Zoom
This talk will be presented in English.
Free & open to the public. Registration is required via the form below.
About the Speaker
Sudha Vasan , Ph.D. (Yale), is Professor in Sociology at the University of Delhi. She teaches and writes on political ecology with a focus on issues of gender, caste, class, and adivasi issues as they intersect with development, ecology and environmentalism. She has a regional interest in the Himalaya, with publications on social, cultural, economic and ecological change, cross-border trade, sacred nature, gender and natural resources, forest law, policy and institutions. Her book Living with Diversity: Forestry Institutions in the Western Himalaya was published in 2007 by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.
Should you have any questions, please contact the Department of Asian Studies at Asian.Studies@ubc.ca.
