Chandana Anusha (Yale University), “Salty and Sweet Lives in a Port Entangled Ecology along the Western Indian Coast” (South Asian Studies Council)

Event time: 
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - 12:00pm to 1:15pm
Location: 
Contact southasiabrownbag@yale.edu to receive the registration information and the ZOOM link. See map
Event description: 

Chandana Anusha is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology. She has a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Sociology from Delhi University. Her dissertation uses port-led transformations in India, as a case study to examine how existing social worlds are reshaped by large-scale infrastructure development in the 21st century. While focusing on the Gujarat coast in Western India, such a study offers a perspective on the material and representational struggles animated in the encounter between any place and territorial projects of modernity. Her research builds on how resource frontiers, as well as possibilities of collective life, emerge in this process of materializing dominant political-economic aspirations, how highly dynamic landscapes – the interface between sea and land, grasslands and agriculture, field and forests that produce a wealth of biodiversity and constitute an ecological mosaic – are conceptualized and inhabited, that is, how state-making endeavors become entangled in the complex web of human and non-human beings that make every landscape unique.