Famine and the Dawning of Hunger: Amarendo Ghosh’s Char Kashem
537 Heller Hall
Abstract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides a synthesis of peer reviewed scientific and social scientific literature on anthropogenic climate change, in recent years has been sounding the alarm of the strong possibility of food insecurity because of climate induced disruptions to agriculture. Through a focus on households within the context of the Bengal Famine of 1943, I consider the economist Amartya Sen’s theory of entitlement developed with respect to this famine. I am particularly interested in the dimension of households as activity, in householding, which I interpret as a mode of interrelating shot through with the economistic and the calculative. I claim that Sen and Ghosh offer us a vantage upon IPCC’s projections for our future. I consider what kind of vantage it is and how it abuts that offered by the IPCC. This is very much a paper in progress and desperately needs critical engagement on its aboutness.
Graduate student discussant: Pranav Menon, PhD student, Anthropology.
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About the Speaker
Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology, sits on the board of the Center for Islamic Studies and serves as affiliate faculty for Comparative Thought and Literature and the 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 (2023) 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 on a Warming Earth: Char Lives and Livelihoods in Northern Bangladesh” and “Schelling and the Romantic Method.”