Ordering the Anthropocene: Law & the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

The American Society for Legal History; Drexel University Department of History; Drexel Law School’s Center for Law, Policy, and Social Action; Drexel Women’s and Gender Studies

Friday, October 4, 2019 8:15 am EDT to Saturday, October 5, 2019 12:00 pm EDT

DREXEL UNIVERSITY, 3101 MARKET STREET, ROOM #224

For more info email: Debjani Bhattacharyya at db893@drexel.edu.
 
Prompted by the contemporary relevance of climate change and disaster relief in the Indian Ocean world, this workshop showcases new scholarship that explores the intersections of climate, landscape transformation, and legal ordering in oceanic and littoral zones. The papers explore a range of issues: from how states sought to bind, improve, and mitigate the power of environmental phenomena; how natural landscapes facilitated border surveillance, boundary-creation as well as the expansion of imperial models of governing nature to the postcolonial world?
 
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4
8:30am–11:00am: Session I
Aarthi Sridhar (University of Amsterdam) – Framing Flux: Fisheries Science and the making of Fisheries Management in South India
Devin Smart (West Virginia University) – "Unequal to Modern Conditions”: Fishing, Development and Extractivism on the Swahili Coast
Ahmed Y. Almaazmi (Princeton University) – Making Time Liquid: Inscribing Legal Rights in the Omani Environment
 
11:15am–11:30am: Coffee Break
 
11:30am–1:15pm: Session 2
Keynote, Prof. Sunil Amrith (Harvard) – Port Cities in the Anthropocene: Contested Histories and Imagined Futures
 
1:15pm–2:30pm: Lunch
 
2:30pm–4:00pm: Session 3
Robert Rouphail (Susquehanna University) – Rebuilding Mazambik: Cyclone Carol, Race, and Spaces of Decolonization in Mauritius, 1950s-1970s
Rukmini Chakraborty (Cornell University) – “Taming the Maritime Frontier”: Legality, Illegality, and Spectres of Wildness in Early Nineteenth Century Eastern Indian Ocean
 
4:00pm–4:15pm: Coffee Break
 
4:15pm–5:45pm: Session 4
Tiraana Bains (Yale University) – Pepper Presidency and Sugar Island: Labor, Ecology and the Making of British Bencoolen
Kimberley Thomas (Temple University) – River Borders and Securitizing Infrastructures in South Asia
 
5:45pm–6:15pm: Closing Comments
 
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5
9:00am-12:00pm: Field Visit to the Riverwards District led by Ali Kenner (STS Drexel) Board van at 33rd and Chestnut Streets (outside Drexel Barnes and Noble Bookstore) by 9:00am. Very limited seating available, please write with interest to Debjani Bhattacharyya at dh893@drexel.edu.