Wollongong Art Gallery and UOW have partnered together to present a series of talks on Entanglements: Humans, Animals, Environments. Researchers from the Australian Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS) and from the Animal Studies Research Network (ASRN) share ideas and developments from their research.
Yamini Narayanan - Entanglements: Humans, Animals, Environments Public Lecture
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Wollongong Art Gallery
THE ‘SMART’ URBAN-STATE AND EMERGENT MULTISPECIES POLITICS IN INDIA WITH YAMINI NARAYANAN
In late 2018, the Indian state awarded ‘capital punishment’ to a 5-year-old tigress Avni, mother of two cubs, who was found ‘guilty’ of killing several humans over a decade, as she tried to defend her shrinking territory against the press of urbanisation.
Even as leopard, elephant and human deaths from ‘conflict’ increase, India approves proposals to build bullet trains and six-pass highways clearing thousands of hectares of forestland.
Against the state’s quest to cultivate a particular kind of (implicitly human) ‘smart citizen’ and smart urbanisms as idealised nationalist visions, I explore the possibilities for inclusive conceptions of more-than-human citizenship in India’s urban futures.
Yamini Narayanan is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University. Her work focuses on multispecies urban and racial politics in India. Dr Narayanan is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.