How does the environment figure in electoral politics in different parts of the world? Environmental politics is typically understood broadly as the policies and state negotiations focused on water and air pollution, natural resource conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, or public lands management. Viewed more expansively, however, “the environment” is a concept under constant renegotiation at multiple scales. From school board nominations to state representative run-offs to the Presidential Election, the environment is both a complex sphere of governance and a space to imagine alternative relationships with nature and the state. This roundtable, in collaboration with Talking Politics, features the authors of recent publications on Engagement which have explore these topics focusing on cases in India, Italy, the Maldives, and the U.S.
When: Wednesday, March 19, 2025 | 1:00pm – 2:30pm Eastern Time.
Where: Zoom (register here)
Moderators
Sydney Giacalone is a Doctoral Candidate of Anthropology at Brown University. She is an environmental anthropologist studying the intersection of ecological repair, ruralness, and relatedness. Her current research focuses on rural multigenerational US farmers and ranchers shifting from conventional agriculture to environmentally and socially reparative models, reckoning with their own culpability in American agriculture’s past and present harms in their efforts toward change. Sydney is a co-editor of Engagement and a team member of Talking Politics 2024.
Jia Hui Lee is Junior Professor of Science & Technology Studies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth. His work brings together conversations in multispecies and environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and African studies. His current research project is a historically informed ethnography of various human-rodent encounters in zoological research, animal training, and pest management schemes in Tanzania. Jia Hui is a co-editor of Engagement.
Presenting Authors
Suchismita Das, Assistant Professor, Social Sciences Division, Ahmedabad University, India. Suchismita is a cultural anthropologist, whose work analyzes the intersections between environmental vulnerability and political vulnerability on India’s north-eastern frontier. Her current SSRC-funded ethnographic project examines infrastructure-collapse in the Himalayan region as a material index of social experiences of climate change. Her writings have appeared in the Himalaya, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics and The Economic and Political Weekly.
Series Post: “We are Children of a Lesser God”: Disaster Relief as Election Handout in the Indian Himalaya
Mariachiara Ficarelli, PhD candidate, Anthropology, Harvard University. Ficarelli researches questions of labor rights, energy transition and animal production and their relation to the changing social and environmental meanings of rurality and de-industrialization in Northern Italy.
Series Post: The Unexpected Complication of a Crustacean Invasion
Eric Hirsch, Associate Professor, Environmental Studies, Franklin & Marshall College. An environmental and economic anthropologist by training, Hirsch’s research focuses on what it means to experience, enact, and embody economic growth, especially in places acutely affected by weather and climate extremes. His first book, Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru (Stanford University Press, 2022), investigated these topics in southern Andean Peru’s Colca Valley. His newer work, scoped more comparatively between Peru, the Maldives, and the United States, asks about growth in the context of adaptation projects, Indigenous community advocacy, and infrastructure associated with resilience.
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Sandy Smith-Nonini, Affiliated Research Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Sandy’s current book The Energy Permacrisis, due out with Routledge in late 2025, is a study of breakdowns in energy/financial systems since 2008, including post-pandemic crises and weaponization of energy in the Russia-Ukraine and Gaza wars. She is the author of Healing the Body Politic (Rutgers 2010) and has published many academic and media articles on health, labor and energy.
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