Lecture| ‘Crisis Temporalities and Geo-Social Futures in the Himalaya’

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Mabel Denzin Gergan from Vanderbilt University.

Drawing on research in Sikkim, India, with the Lepcha-led Affected Citizens of Teesta and geoscientists across the Himalaya, this talk examines the crisis temporalities through which disasters become legible.

Centering the 2023 South Lhonak Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, which destroyed the Teesta Stage III dam, I trace how state geology renders Himalayan landscapes as extractable terrain and as inherently disaster-prone. Reinforced by alarmist climate narratives, this framing obscures infrastructural decisions that make hazards catastrophic while justifying renewed hydropower and critical mineral extraction. Yet critiques of geology as an imperial discipline do not exhaust the political possibilities of geoscientific practice.

Placing scientific forecasts of the flood and Himalayan geological research more broadly, alongside Lepcha and Buddhist prophecies and sacred landscape narratives, I show how Indigenous cosmologies and geoscientific approaches read the earth, offering a shared refusal of this state logic. Without equating these knowledge systems, I argue that their fidelity to place and attention to deep temporalities can loosen the grip of short horizons through which disasters register only as crisis or catastrophe. Their encounter opens geosocial futures (Clark and Yusoff 2017) attentive to long histories and obligations without diminishing the urgency of present harm. 

Mabel Denzin Gergan is assistant professor of Asian studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity and race. Her research and teaching are grounded in the Indian Himalayan region and attend to the racial and colonial logics underlying Indigenous communities’ disproportionate exposure to environmental risk and vulnerability.