Abstract: 

This talk will introduce historical urban political ecology (HUPE) – an integrated and cross-fertilized approach emerged along the convergence of environmental history and political ecology to capture multi-layered processes in the making of urban nature. Using Kolkata’s blue infrastructures as the empirical frame of reference, it will demonstrate the potentials of HUPE as a comprehensive framework not only to identify complex urban challenges within the Anthropocene, but also offer opportunities that can be optimized towards just and resilient urban transitions.

About the Speaker: 

Jenia Mukherjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur. Her research spans across environmental history, political ecology and transdisciplinary water. As part of EU-India, SSHRC (Canada) and AHRC-ICHR funded projects, she is currently focusing on coastal livelihoods of deltaic Bengal. Jenia was awarded the Australian Leadership Awards Fellowship in 2010 and 2015 by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia to conduct research on the chars of Bengal. She received the Carson Writing Fellowship (2018-19) for completing her book Blue Infrastructures: Natural History, Political Ecology and Urban Development in India (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020).