Dr Preeti Sampat, Associate Professor, Sociology & Social Anthropology, SIAS delivered a talk at a panel at Gokhale Education Society’s N.B.Thakur Law College, Nashik, on ‘Landed Property and Exclusion: Gender, Caste, Environment and Liberalism’.
Dr Joya John, Assistant Professor, Literature, SIAS participated in a virtual symposium titled, Minor Literature, Major Stakes: Hindi’s Political Worlds on October 10–11, 2025 organized by New York University & Vanderbilt University.
Dr John’s paper was titled, ‘Hindi in Local, Global, and Planetary Frames: Environment, Climate Change, and the Affordances of Hindi’. The paper analysed how state discourse stymies the language of environment communication and what challenges new global or planetary discourses of climate change pose for Hindi. The presentation was a set of observations based on the work of environmentalist Anupam Mishra, climate translations and contemporary Hindi fiction and poetry.
Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS delivered an invited talk on 14 October 2025 at the National-Level Pre-COP 30 Workshop organised by the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The title of the talk was ’Reconceptualization of climate responsibility and implications for climate finance’.
The workshop was organised by Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in collaboration with the Karnataka Forest Department (KFD), Institute of Wood Science and Technology (IWST), and United Nations Global Compact Network (UNGCN). The purpose of the workshop is to inform India’s negotiating positions on climate change at the Conference of Parties 30 (COP 30) in Brazil in November.
Dr Sabah Siddiqui, Assistant Professor, Psychology, SIAS, delivered a talk at Vidyashilp University for the VU Lecture Series titled ‘The Unconscious Life of Ageing’.
Professor Sivakumar Srinivasan, Dean – Research and Professor, Physics, SIAS has penned an article in The Hindu titled 2025 physics Nobel Prize: the magic of quantum pervades all scales. Professor Srinivasan writes about how even though the laureates’ experiments were conducted in the mid-1980s, the ideas continue to spur research activities in many domains. He also sheds light on how their work emphasises the importance of basic research. Though the work’s original motivation was not quantum computing, its impact on the field amply demonstrates how basic research can foster technological innovations.
Dr Vasupradha Srikrishna, Assistant Professor, Communications, IFMR GSB was recently invited to contribute to a key learning event on Positive Deviance, organised by SNV and led by Professor. Arvind Ainghal (Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor, The University of Texas at El Paso) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, running from 29 September to 3 October 2025. She also conducted further research on positive deviance during the visit. The workshop successfully mobilised 70 participants from 15+ countries and 25+ organisations. They focused on exploring community-led solutions, highlighting how local efforts are transforming lives across crucial sectors like gender, health, education, nutrition, and agriculture.
On October 1 2025, Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS presented a talk as part of our monthly public seminar series on “A new development classification for the 21st century” at Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
About the Talk
Nordic countries are frequently positioned as the leaders of “sustainable development” but their high per capita resource use presents a significant challenge. We propose a refined conceptual framework for sustainable development centering “universalizability” – the capacity for a development trajectory to have be globally adopted without overshooting biophysical limits. Our analysis identifies Panama, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka as having achieved the highest levels of scalable social progress.
Dr Dhara and team leverage this framework to propose a new equity-oriented development classification that aligns with current research on environmental limits. This framework offers an alternative to the prevailing conception of a “developed country”, and enables the identification of replicable development models. Its goal is to offer policymakers guidance toward more equitable and sustainable progress in the 21st century.
Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS was recently on ‘The Boring Climate Podcast’. The conversations revolved around how one-size-fits-all climate solutions often fail and the need to look beyond easy solutions and embrace the complexity of our warming world.
Dr Shriddha Shah, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, SIAS delivered a talk on ‘Animal Laborans to Homo Faber: Rethinking Labour and Work Through Arendt and Marx’ at Human Sciences Research Centre, IIIT, Hyderabad on 1 October 2025.
About the Talk
The concept of labour with its various implications is central to the structuring of the modern political economy. It is also the cornerstone of Karl Marx’s assessment of the capitalist political economy. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, offers a critique of Marx’s thesis on labour, and thereby his ensuing assessment of society and politics. This paper argues that there is a significant change in the conceptualisation of labour, as discussed by Hannah Arendt, particularly in her examination of the distinction between the concepts of labour and work.
Marx in his thesis makes no distinction between work and labour. However, for Arendt the lack of this distinction is a critical component of her criticism of Marx’s thesis on labour. This paper addresses this issue and argues that Arendt’s thesis rests on presuppositions of metaphysical and methodological dualism, in contrast to those of Marx, and the changed conception of labour is not contingent or a matter of oversight but is based on commitments to different points of view. The paper further argues that this change also influences subsequent formulations of labour and its issues, in contemporary assessments of the political economy.
Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS delivered a talk titled ‘What is a developed country?’, in Professor Julia Steinberger’s group at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, on 18 September 2025.