Speaker: Dr Dolly Kikon (University of Melbourne)

Title of the series:

Crisis of Imagination: Registers of Loss, Pain, Hope, and Climate Change in India

It was a lecture that was co-hosted by Rahul Ranjan (Postdoctoral Fellow, OsloMet University) and Shalini Iyengar (Yale University) in the fall term, of 2022. It hosted seven academics over two and half months and delivered lectures on the range of issues underlined in the series.

Concept note of the series:

In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the vocabulary of loss and pain is commonplace. Defined variously, this epoch surfaces in violent footprints on entire ecologies and chronicles the devastation of biodiversity as a regular occurrence. Moreover, these changes manifest beyond species extinction and other material impacts by reorienting human imagination itself. Often, the causal explanation of this change is anthropogenic intervention in fragile ecologies. The effects of such interventions are not, of course, limited to a controlled area but ripple out and interact with other vulnerabilities in often unpredictable ways.

Unsurprisingly, it imposes the heaviest burdens on those placed at the bottom rung of society – seeking to destroy their varied forms of livelihood, and patterns of employment, among others. The grim reality of these changes demands massive shifts in policy thinking around climate adaptation and mitigation as well as a fundamental reorientation of thinking about life itself. Capturing these changes and their entangled afterlives requires the crafting of narratives and discourses that illustrate both these diverse losses as well as attend to the ways in which human and more-than-human lives are able to flourish amidst the ruination. After all, the critical feature of the Anthropocene is that it is fundamentally an era of complex entanglements.

This lecture series seeks to begin a conversation on Anthropocene ‘entanglement’ as a form of engagement, a descriptive illustration of changes (loss, pain, joy, and celebration) that fill our lives. By bringing together writers, artists, and academics, we aim to create the space for a dialogue within the environmental humanities space in India. The series will run for two months and remains an online public event. Full detail of the event can be sought from the organisers below. We look forward to having you join us.

Shalini Iyengar

Anthropology, Yale University

Rahul Ranjan

Oslo Metropolitan University