Join us for a seminar on “Rethinking Water Crisis, Narrative Designs, and Strategies of Resilience.”
How do we think of water democracy in a structurally—social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological—marginalised landscape marked with escalating consequences of anthropogenic water crisis? How do we foreground lived-embodied experiences of water-scarce communities at the frontline of this crisis, but whose voices are often shadowed in water governance frameworks? Addressing these requires moving beyond water’s economic value, which undermines the socio-political, cultural, and ecological vulnerabilities to hydro-injustices. To understand the pluriverse of anthropogenic water crisis, an interdisciplinary mapping of India’s water war is urgent.
The seminar will explore multifaceted ontologies of anthropogenic water crisis through the lenses of environmental humanities. It plans to produce an interdisciplinary platform dialogic with evolving narrative modes and resilience strategies apropos of water crisis, and how the same can be imagined and instrumentalized using discourses from graphic novels, environmental economics, policy research, and sociology, advocating for an epistemological shift—from thinking about the water-scarce communities to thinking with them.
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Time: 6:30-8:00 pm IST / 8:00-9:30 am EST
Venue: Lecture Hall 1, India International Center (Annex), New Delhi and on Zoom
Chair:
Doris Sommer, Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Presenters:
• Ashok Kumar, Professor, Department of Physical Planning, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
• Jenia Mukerjee, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
• Nobonita Rakshit, Mittal Institute India Fellow 2025
(Please note: Doris Sommer will be joining the seminar virtually.)
