South Asia Speaker Series: Naveeda Khan Book Talk
In a talk titled, “From the Jamuna Chars in Bangladesh to UN-led Climate Negotiations: An author recounts her journey across the many scales of climate impacts and action”, Dr. Naveeda Khan joins the South Asia Speaker Series for a talk on two of her books.
In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Dr. Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Nature is a primary force at play within this existence, as chauras live itinerantly and in flux with the ever-changing river flows, where land is here today and gone tomorrow, and where the quality of life itself is intertwined with this mutability. By showing how the alluvial flood plains configure chaura life, Khan shows how nature can both give rise to and inhabit social, political, and spiritual forms of life.
In Quest of a Shared Planet offers an illuminating first-person ethnographic perspective on climate change negotiations. Focusing on the Paris Agreement, anthropologist Naveeda Khan introduces readers to the only existing global approach to the problem of climate change, one that took nearly thirty years to be collectively agreed upon. She shares her detailed descriptions of COP21 to COP25 and growing understanding of the intricacies of the climate negotiation process, leading her to ask why countries of the Global South invested in this slow-moving process and to explore how they have maneuvered it.
About the Author: Naveeda Khan is associate professor of anthropology, sits on the board of the Center for Islamic Studies and serves as affiliate faculty for the Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and writings on the environment. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012), River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2022) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (2010). Naveeda has also published numerous articles and book chapters and has edited several special issues/subsections of the journals Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropological Theory, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. She is working on two manuscripts “Householding in Motion: Char Lives and Livelihoods in Northern Bangladesh” and “Schelling and the Romantic Method.”
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Please kindly RSVP so we can ensure an accurate headcount for catering. To request accommodations due to a disability, contact Annalise Burke at annalise.burke@georgetown.edu no later than 10/05/2023. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date. Please contact Annalise with any other inquiries regarding this event.