Join us for a film screening and discussion with Chitrangada Choudhury, Director and Cinematographer, and Aniket Aga, Associate Director, moderated by Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico, Harvard University.
This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP above.
About the film:
In a village in Odisha’s Eastern Ghats, barefoot ecologist Debal Deb & his team are conserving over 1000 endangered heirloom rice varieties in-situ. But the region, one of the world’s surviving biodiversity hotspots and home to sophisticated Kondh Adivasi agroecological knowledge systems, is irreversibly changing with the coming of chemical-intensive genetically modified cotton. Seed Stories takes a worm’s eye view of these shifts and invites audiences to reflect on ‘What is sustainability?’
About the speakers:
Chitrangada Choudhury is an Indian journalist, filmmaker and a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Zurich. Her reportage on the environment, social justice and rural communities has been cited for multiple awards including the Sanskriti Foundation Award, the Press Council of India’s National Award for Investigative Reporting, and the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize twice. She has been on the founding team of The People’s Archive of Rural India, and the Editorial Board of Article 14. Her academic research has appeared in edited volumes and journals including ‘Elementa – Science of the Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism’.
Aniket Aga is Assistant Professor of Geography at UB-SUNY and the author of Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. His research lies at the intersection of science and technology, development and democracy. His article on pesticide marketing and caste, published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, won the 2019-20 Krishna Bharadwaj-Eric Wolf Prize from the journal.
Seed Stories (2024). Documentary Film. 42 min, Odiya, Kui, English
Director & Cinematography: Chitrangada Choudhury; Associate Director: Aniket Aga; Editor: Ajay TG; Sound: Asheesh Pandya; Colourist: Srikanth Kabothu
