Initiatives
Lotha fishermen at Doyang River, Nagaland. Image Credit: Dolly Kikon
The Ecologies of Care Initiative was launched by the Center for South Asian Studies in collaboration with The Humanities Institute through a one-day workshop that was held on October 14, 2024. The workshop brought together scholars from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Lincoln University (LU) who work at the forefront of the social sciences, arts, and humanities to address livability as a desired condition for all. Unbreathable air, unbearable temperature, and unimaginable disparities we have witnessed as scholars in South Asia.
Situated in the Himalayan region, the Ecologies of Care Initiative will include conversations across the boundaries of contemporary nation-states, including Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Northeast India, and beyond. Known as the water towers of Asia, this region holds much of the world’s snow and ice beyond the North and South Pole. It is a site of incredible cultural and linguistic diversity, with hundreds of languages spoken and distinct colonial experiences that shape contemporary global Indigenous movements in South Asia. Ecologies of Care focuses on tracing how peoples along the Himalayas cobble together livelihoods among rapidly shifting government-sponsored projects, including militarism, gender, environmentalism, and tourism.
This initiative adopts an Indigenous lens for a decolonial assessment of the current socio-ecological situation in South Asia and the paths forward to a livable future for all. What does it mean to live in this time of changing climates? Why do we show up for the care work required of us? How are relationships emboldened or refracted by Ecologies of Care? Existing situations force us to reassess our methodological tools as well. Centering care means adopting an ethic of responsibility, connections, and respect rather than the established notions of neutrality and objectivity. Ecologies of Care as a framework for life encourages scholars to reconfigure their independent individual research practice as interconnected nodes of life-sustaining forms of knowledge co-creation.
Ecologies of Care envisions a collaborative dialogue to explore the Himalayan region’s various intersections, expressions, and care practices. In centering Indigenous philosophies, worldviews, and experiences, we view the Himalayan region as one where communities live creatively despite the odds and struggles. We fold together stories of struggle and care for the land with tales of love for fellow humans and other beings. We weave aspirations for justice, equality, and sovereignty into the everyday fabric of life.
Speakers
Dr. Ritodhi Chakraborty is a broadly trained, interdisciplinary environmental social scientist and activist. In the past, as co-chair of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi’s Early Career Forum, he advocated for a more just and inclusive research sector. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ‘Centre of Excellence: Future Productive Landscapes’ at Lincoln University, he helped create a multifunctional landscape design reflecting place-based indigenous aspirations and audited the potential for just engagement within such projects. He is also leading a project through the Ministry of Primary Industries to develop a Climate Maladaptation Assessment Tool for Aotearoa New Zealand and co-leads the SSHRC-funded Knowledge Justice Collective project. Over the past decade he has collaborated with rural and Indigenous communities across India, Bhutan, China, and Aotearoa New Zealand on issues of youth migration, corporate agrarian takeover, livelihood insecurity, and climate adaptation politics.
Title: From Functional Inclusion to Meaningful Representation: Examining the possibilities of plural assessment systems in supporting Climate and Environmental Justice
Abstract: How do we ensure social and ecological justice for communities and ecologies in the Himalaya? In recent years this question has catalyzed a host of responses. Many of the provocations, while deeply aspirational, are burdened by the exhausting task of challenging a host of powerful historical forces. How would such efforts be impacted by the construction and implementation of accountability systems? Systems which would both witness and challenge regional hegemonic processes. Can such accountability systems support the ongoing relational fabrication of care-ful ecologies, by turning the tools of measurement, prediction and auditing back on to the powerful? In this talk I will explore two such examples of accountability systems, developed in participation with Indigenous scholars and activists, and examine their potentials and limitations as allies in Himalayan struggles towards social and environmental justice.
Michael Hathaway currently teaches anthropology and directs the David Lam Centre for the Asia Pacific at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has worked on Indigenous politics in China and Japan, and was inspired to appreciate how understanding social life as including many beings can help us foster more livable worlds for all. His first book, Environmental Winds, explores China’s role in global environmentalism and his latest book, What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds they Make, follows the adventures of a globe trotting mushroom between China and Japan. A banana slug, he continues to work closely with USCS professor Anna Tsing and the Matsutake Worlds Research Group.
Title: Asia’s Role in the Global Indigenous Movement: Thinking across the Himalayas
Abstract: For decades, diverse groups across the Himalayas have been practicing forms of transnational alliance across languages, cultural differences, and national boundaries. Whereas majoritarian expectations often assume that Indigenous peoples are isolated and remote, in fact these forms of cosmopolitan engagements have been part and parcel of the emergence of Indigeneity as a force to be reckoned with. Thinking across East Asia and South Asia, how do differing national histories and forms of governance inflect but not totally determine the creative ways Himalayan peoples are fostering new worlds?
Zulunungsang Lemtur belongs to the Ao (Naga) tribe from Nagaland, India and he currently teaches at Oikos University, Oakland. He received his PhD from Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA and he is the author of Climate Refugees: Towards a Tribal Theology of Restoration, and Tribal Cultural Imagination and Theological Conversation. His research work, publications, and academic interests center around Indigenous studies/theology, ecology/eco-theology, contextual and Liberation theologies, interfaith dialogue, and peacebuilding.
Title: Indigenous Spirituality: Pathways for Ecological Care and Sustainability
Abstract: For Indigenous people, spirituality is the deeper dimension of the socio-ethical and religious principle that touches a community’s life and governs it, and the most striking feature of this is their cosmocentric perception of spirituality. Indigenous spirituality emphasizes that creation is central and all other beings are part of it, and they perceive the whole cosmos as one integrated and interlinked experience of spiritual connection to nature. This provides a vision of life rooted in a harmonious relationship with nature, preservation, and protection of people’s culture and worldview. The organic connection of all realities is the core of indigenous spirituality, and this symbiotic understanding can contribute towards a fuller appreciation of creation.
Pasang Yangjee Sherpa is a Sharwa from Pharak, northeastern Nepal (popularly known as the Mount Everest region). She is an Assistant Professor of Lifeways in Indigenous Asia at the University of British Columbia. Her current research employs community-based methodologies to explore collective survival on a warming planet, grounded in her long-term ethnographic study of Sherpa communities at home and amongst the diaspora. She is a contributing author to the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report, and has published in various academic journals from Human Organization to Current Opinion in Sustainability Studies. She regularly appears in the public media to share her research insights. She co-founded the Knowledge Justice Collective in 2022 to foster meaningful engagement across knowledge systems, recognizing the epistemological value of Indigenous knowledges in solving world problems.
Title: Living: A Sherpa offering to an ailing planet
Abstract: This talk builds on my latest publications that advance knowledge pluralism and call for justice-oriented climate studies in the Himalaya to explore how the Sherpa community in Khumbu (northeast Nepal, a.k.a. Mount Everest region), living with accelerated warming, have engaged with ancestral knowledge and place-based wisdom. Sherpa relationality, where humans and non-humans co-inhabit the many dimensions of the world, and Sherpa temporality, where living and dying are interconnected phases in the cycle of time, inform this talk. I discuss the values and wisdom that have guided the community to survive world-altering changes, and expand the notion of sustainability as one that is grounded in the relationships that nurture the continuity of the people. This Sherpa offering to an ailing planet adjusts our analytical and discursive scales to meaningfully engage with Indigenous Peoples in South Asian studies.
Ms. Kesang Tshomo is a horticulture scientist and the Advisor to the Department of Agriculture, Bhutan. She serves as a Specialist (III) under the Department of Agriculture, provides policy advice and recommendations and guidance on overall growth and direction of the Department for Agriculture. She also serves as the chair to the Technical Working Group for National Organic programme in Bhutan, and is member secretary to the National Organic Board, member to Variety Release Committee, Technology release Committee, Technical contact to IFOAM-ASIA-Bhutan as link for networking since 2012. She is the focal officer representing the Minister of Agriculture and Livestock for Food Security Skilling Programme for the National Service, Gyalsung Academy, an upcoming life skilling programme for high school youth to teach about agriculture and food security which will teach 2500 students in each cohort from 2026 onwards. Her official mandate includes coordinating and establishing the academy with the academic teaching and training programmes and agricultural field as required for Bhutan. She works closely with researchers, farmers and extension, private sector, stakeholders in organic production, processing, regulation, standards development and certification systems, and focuses on improving the livelihoods of the organic farmers by supporting targeted crops for domestic and export markets in Bhutan.
Title: Sustainable Futures: Organic and Traditional Agriculture in Bhutan
Abstract: What is Bhutan’s aspiration to go organic? Throughout my career, I have espoused to contribute to the global organic movement in the Himalayan region, and especially in my home country, the Kingdom of Bhutan. I believe that livelihood improvement of farmers in my country involves improving support systems and efficient services available to enhance their capacity to reach the market with Bhutan Organic Brand and Grown in Bhutan-Organic and linkage to international certification systems. In this presentation, I will dwell on collaboration (with researchers, educational institutions, and policy bodies) and emphasize on caring for biodiversity and focusing on the organic movement in Bhutan. I will share the national vision of the Kingdom of Bhutan that underlines (i) Protection, conservation and improvement of the pristine environment and safety of the biodiversity; (ii) Prevention of pollution and ecological degradation through farming; (iii) Securing ecologically balanced sustainable development while promoting justifiable economic and social development; and food security; (iv) Building organic brand for the country and certification systems; and lastly (v) involving women and youth entrepreneurship in farming and agribusiness building in Bhutan.