Amrita Sen, member of the DFM West Bengal team, joined us to introduce her new book “A Political Ecology of Forest Conservation in India: Communities, Wildlife and the State” (Routledge, 2021).
Amrita discussed her ongoing research on the political ecological context of the Sundarbans, which has helped orient recent fieldwork within the Dried Fish Matters project. Her talk introduced the diverse economies of the Sundarbans – including forest fishing, honey collection, and prawn farming – and illustrated the inadequacies of attempts to govern the complex socio-political and inter-species realities of this region. Discussion after the talk focused on the complexity of the political ecological landscape of the Sundarbans, and in particular on the issue of defining rights for resource users who are positioned as “non-native”.
You can watch the webinar on our YouTube channel now.
About Amrita
Amrita Sen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and a Visiting Faculty with Azim Premji University. Her research interests include cultural and political ecology, politics of forest conservation, urban environmental conflicts and Anthropocene studies. In 2019, Amrita received the “Excellence in PhD Thesis award” from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, for her doctoral research on the conservation politics in Sundarbans.