Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Suresh Babu G.S
(Assistant Professor, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, JNU)
Will be presenting a paper on
Co-production of Knowledge in Climate Science: A Field View from Ladakh Himalaya
Date & Time:
October 16, 2018 (Tuesday), 3.30 pm
Venue:
CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: Climate change has brought about a new semantic field across the disciplines. Interdisciplinary research becomes a new language among the scientific community to navigate the problematic of climate change as it generated formidable discourses on the nature of crisis human society confront at the global scale today. Because of its unpredictability, climate change not only signals a theoretical puzzle, but also put a heavy burden on the scientific communities. Although the problem is being acknowledged in terms of a planetary scale, cultural dilemma and institutional crisis, its actual effect is unevenly distributed across the societies. Both the scientist and the social scientist have already encountered various forms of climate uncertainties on the lives of people and the environment on the one hand and larger politics played around seeking adaptation strategies in specific locations in the developing world on the other. Taking a cue from the idea of political ecology, this paper discusses a set of complex events in the lives of people and the ecosystem driven by climate change and explores how they together constitute a set of objects for scientific inquiry. The uncertainty in climate science studies not only challenges the conventional disciplinary traditions, but also opens up new possibilities to imagine the interdisciplinary sensibilities in which co-production of knowledge becomes salient. This study explores how the scientific community carried out an interdisciplinary field investigation and deliberations to report and account the climate change affected areas with the participation of local people in the Ladakh Himalayas.
Bio: Dr. Suresh Babu G. S, teaches at Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU, New Delhi. He began his professional career in the Dept. of Sociology, University of Jammu in 2005. His teaching and research work broadly plunge into sociologies of subaltern communities, education, social ecology and social development. He has undertaken research projects in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and Kerala on education and development. As a member of the collaborative project under DAAD, he had been visiting scholar at the University of Cologne, Germany in 2015 and 2017. Recently, he has taken up a new research on the Political Culture of the University Campuses in India for the ICSSR. He is the author of the book (ed) Education and Public Sphere: Exploring the Structures of Mediation in the Post-colonial India, Routledge, (forthcoming).
