Mar 06 2026 to Mar 06 2026 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Science has never been apolitical. It has just been silent about politics and social identities.

This talk traces the entanglements between nature and society across thirty years of field research in India and Latin America, moving between blackbuck conservation in Maharashtra, iguana habitats in Costa Rica, fisheries in the Brazilian Amazon, Afro-Colombian movements, and pastoralist struggles in Kutch.

What connects them is not geography but a single multiple entanglements of culture, nature, and political economy.

A Q&A will follow the lecture.

Speaker

Kiran Asher
Professor, Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass, Amherst
A biologist-turned-social scientist, Kiran Asher is a professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass, Amherst.  Her scholarship and teaching are grounded in over three-decades of field-based research in Asia and Latin America (Costa Rica, Belize, Brazil, and Colombia).  From 2013-2015 she worked for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. She is also an Adjunct Fellow at ATREE, Bangalore.

She has written about this seemingly unusual combination of the natural and social sciences, in these essays: Thinking Fragments and Fieldwork. Her other publications include a monograph Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Duke University Press, 2009), and articles in Antipode, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Feminist Studies; Feminist Review; GeoForum; Hypatia, and elsewhere. She is currently completing her second book entitled Field Work: Natures-Cultures in the Age of Climate Change.