What Is A River? Environmental Humanities Through a South Asianist Lens

What Is A River? Environmental Humanities Through a South Asianist Lens

Do we know what a river is? Is a river necessarily part of nature? Do we know what nature is? Does a focus on nature necessarily occlude politics, or are we restricted to a mere politics of nature? Or, thinking with Benjamin, can we imagine a natural politics, as he does natural history? What does this time of crisis demand from our concepts of river, nature and politics?

Join us for a conversation anchored in Naveeda Khan's recent books, River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2022) and In Quest of a Shared Planet : Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023).

Participants: Naveeda Khan (JHU Anthropology), Veena Das (JHU Anthropology), Aamir Mufti (JHU English), Bill Connolly (JHU Political Science), and Faisal Devji (U. of Oxford History)

Thursday, March 13th, 2025

Levering Great Hall at the Johns Hopkins University

5-7pm, reception to follow

Host or Publisher JHU Global South Humanities Initiative