Committee Update

Over the last year, I have struggled to put together an advisory committee for my doctoral studies. While I have secured the first two areas of focus – political economy and political ecology, the third has remained quite elusive. For a few months I was considering cultural politics, but due to my somewhat negative experiences with the field and its tendency to hypercynicism, I have all but abandoned the idea.

This leaves me in a quandary which I will need to extricate myself out from quite soon. I do know that sometime down the road I will want to pull in GIS techniques, but I have thus far focused my attention on catching up in the theoretical realm. At the same time, I have begun my gradual return to activism after a two year hiatus, and will want to also continue my involvement with social movements.

Over the next while I will attempt to develop a reading list around my two definite themes. The conjunction between Marxism and ecology seems particularly interesting, and I will supplement this with studies into social/environmental movements and agrarian political economy:

Here are a few references of books I am currently looking at:

Doyle, T. (2005). Environmental movements in minority and majority worlds : a global perspective. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Foster, J. B. (2002). Ecology against capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Kovel, J. (2002). The enemy of nature : the end of capitalism or the end of the world? London: Zed Books.

Pepper, D. (1993). Eco-socialism : from deep ecology to social justice. London ; New York: Routledge.

Bardhan, P. K. (2003). Poverty, agrarian structure, and political economy in India : selected essays. New Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Kistaiah, M., Srinivasulu, K., & Kakatiya University. Dept. of Political Science & Public Administration. (1993). Agrarian question in India, some perspectives. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.

Winter 2005 Term Papers

As you can see from the sparse number of posts from this past season, my course work was particularly heavy, leaving me little time to update this and other blogs. However, all three of my term papers dealt intimately with issues related to this research project:

5111 Cosmopolitics
The paper for this course focused on the controversy surrounding the location of the capital in the new Indian hill state of Uttaranchal. Basically, I used the two options as a trope to talk about the global-local literature in a new way that would reframe some very old topics in political geography.

5325 Cultural Politics: Environment & Development
Here, I revisited the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation as an entry into discussing some of the major theoretical work that has attempted to address the nature-society dichotomy and political power of knowledge production at the heart of the THED debate.

5390 Seminar in Social & Economic Space
The paper for this course gave me the opportunity to work through the political foundation for environmental organizing in the Indian context, particularly vis-a-vis the contending Gandhian and Marxist traditions that have historically guided social movements.

I'll upload a more thorough review of these papers and maybe substantial portions of the papers themselves as soon as I get the summer semester sorted out!