GEOS Colloquium Series Earth and Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Presents a Lecture by Dr. Mabel Denzin Gergen Environmental Humanities, Georgetown University Let Us Teach You Geography: The Politics of Difference and Belonging in South Asia's Borderlands Annually thousands of students flood India's metropolitan cities in pursuit of higher education but for those marked as racial 'others', the transition to city life is significantly more precarious. On January 30, 2014, 19-year old Nido Taniam, a student from Arunachal Pradesh, a mountainous borderland state in North-Eastern India, died after a violent altercation with shopkeepers in Delhi. As linguistic, religious, and racial minorities, Himalayan youth are often targets of hate crimes, racial discrimination, and are routinely denied housing. Their bodies and affect mark them as not quite of the nation, at the margins of citizenship and belonging. Thursday, March 29, at 5:30 PM Science Center, Room 4102 The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Light snacks and refreshments will be served. (not recorded) Mabel Denzin Gergen, Ph.D, Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016. Mabel is a geographer with special interest in ecological precarity, environmental justice, indigenous youth, and postcolonial/decolonial critiques of the Anthropocene. So far her work has focused on the relationship between the Indian state and its Himalayan borderlands through the lens of large infrastructure, hazards, and indigenous youth activism. As Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities in addition to seminar responsibilities, she will be developing two main themes of research i) postcolonial approaches to climate change and the Anthropocene ii) indigenous youth led environmental justice movements in postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. She is from the Himalayan region and has a B.A. from Delhi University and an M.A. from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
