South Asia Center to hold Annual Sustainable South Asia Workshop on October 5
On Saturday, October 5th, the
Cornell-Syracuse Sustainable South Asia Initiative will hold it's annual workshop at Syracuse University. We invite all those in Central New York who
are interested in any aspect of sustainability in South Asia to attend and help
us plan future sustainability events. The workshop will be held in 500 Hall of Languages from 9 am until 2 pm. 
The workshop will open with a keynote address by Dr. Andrew Flachs, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University at 9:15 am. His talk, Cultivating
Knowledge: Decoding Agricultural Sustainability Through an Ethnography of Seeds, will address how a single seed is more than just the promise of a
plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a
sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote
genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more
sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of
economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences
as dire as death. Dr. Flachs’ research spans
sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and
political ecology. Through this work, he seeks to better understand how humans
create sustainable environmental relationships within the context of markets,
ecology, state interventions, and social networks.
Following Dr. Flachs' talk, there will a discussion of how his ethnography of seeds can be used to think about other aspects of social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability in South Asia.
Following lunch,
members of the CNY Humanities Corridor Working Group on Sociocultural
Sustainability in South Asia will break out to discuss their future plans
and programming.
If you are interested in attending, please
email Emera Bridger Wilson (elbridge@syr.edu)
by October 1st.
This workshop is part of the Sustainable South Asia Initiative, a four-year project of the Cornell-Syracuse Consortium on South Asia, funded by the U.S.
Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center Grant and the Central
New York Humanities Corridor.