On 7 May the Planetary Justice Task Force and the Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University, USA are organizing a webinar “Exploring Planetary Justice: Views from India”.
When: Wednesday, 7 May 2025, 8:00-9:30 Denver; 15:00-16:30 London, 16:00-17:30 Amsterdam; 19:30-21:00 New Delhi; 24:00-1:30am Melbourne. Find the time in your local timezone.
Where: online (link provided upon registration)
Webinar series co-conveners: Agni Kalfagianni, Stefan Pedersen, Dimitris Stevis
Description
Intersecting social and environmental challenges are affecting and endangering the human and non-human realms on earth. This has intensified demands for justice, with some scholars proposing the concept of ‘planetary justice’. However, what exactly planetary justice means and whether this resonates with existing scholarship and practice of justice, especially in the ecosocial sense, is currently underexplored.
This joint initiative between the Earth System Governance project and the Center for Environmental Justice of Colorado State University aims at establishing an international network of researchers who are interested in exploring the place of planetary justice within their thinking and practice on ecosocial justice. For this reason we are conducting a series of webinars across different world regions under the title ‘Exploring Planetary Justice’. Participants are invited to address three main prompts drawing on their own research and experiences, which we will compare and synthesize at the end of the webinar series. In this fourth webinar we focus on India.
- What do you see as the major theoretical and political tendencies within ecosocial justice in your region/country?
- What are the forces for or against ecosocial justice in your region/country, in addition to the global or planetary levels?
- Has the concept of Planetary Justice or something similar found its way into your region/country? How? What does Planetary Justice mean to you?
This will be a 90 minute event: 60 minutes for panelist comments on prompts, leaving 30 minutes for questions and discussion.
Panelists
Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor at the Center de Sociologie de Organisations (CNRS) at Sciences Po, France. Her research combines cultural sociology, feminist political economy, and post-colonial theory to examine how economic and political ideologies, socio-cultural identities, and inequalities affect how ecological transitions are conceptualized and enacted at multiple scales: from the household to the city to the transnational milieu. As a critical scholar, she pays specific attention to how “environmental” initiatives—be it municipal recycling schemes, green space development, or global circular economy transition plans—reinforce or contest different manifestations of race, class, gender, and caste-based oppression, while exploring how minoritized communities resist, co-opt, and negotiate elite environmentalism. She has published two books connecting environmental justice, sustainability, and development: Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability (MIT Press,2024) and a co-edited volume The Circular Economy and the Global South (Routledge, UK, 2019).
Michele Lobo is an Australian geographer of Indian heritage and scholar activist who invigorates debates on climate change, biodiversity loss and planetary justice. Her research centres the human and more-than-human worlds of Indigenous peoples, ethnic minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the ‘many souths’ of the world including India and Australia. Michele holds several leadership positions – she serves as Editor, Social & Cultural Geography, a prestigious international journal and Chair, Institute of AustralianGeographers Equity Reference Group. Her recent open-access edited book Planetary Justice: Stories and Studies of Action, Resistance and Solidarity was published last year with Bristol University Press. She completed her PhD in Human Geography from Monash University, Melbourne.
Silpa Satheesh works as an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. Her primary areas of interest are social movements, environmental labour studies, political economy, ethnography and climate change. Her forthcoming book Labour, Nature and Capitalism: Exploring labour-environmental conflicts in Kerala, India (UCL Press) explores the conflicts between trade unions and working-class environmental movements surrounding an issue of industrial pollution in Kerala, a south Indian state. Silpa’s ongoing project studies the interface of labour and climate change in Kerala, focusing on the exposure and experience of informal workers to climate risks and the role of trade unions. Silpa has published her research in journals and edited volumes including Critical Asian Studies, Sociology Compass, The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, and Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Silpa holds a PhD in Sociology from University of South Florida, Tampa, an MPhil in Applied Economics from CDS (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and an MA in Economics from University of Hyderabad.
Mukul Sharma is Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, India, specialising in environment, media and development. With a PhD in Political Science, his research focuses on the intersections of caste, ecology, and environmental justice in India. Sharma’s works, including Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics (OUP, 2017) and Green and Saffron: The RSS, Modi and Indian Environmental Politics (Permanent Black, 2024), have critically examined the socio-political dimensions of environmental issues. His recent book, Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice (CUP, 2024), further explores the linkages between caste, Dalits and environment justice. Sharma’s career spans over three decades, during which he has held leadership roles at institutions like the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and Amnesty International. He has been widely published in journals, including Economic and Political Weekly, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Studies in Indian Politics, Race and Class and Environment and Society.
Moderator: Pritee Sharma
Pritee Sharma is a Professor of Economics, Co-Convener of the JPN National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities, and Group Lead of the Sustainability Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore, India. Her research experience is largely related to the analytical problem of “Allocation and Access” to the natural resources particularly land, water and forests. She applies her education and analytical skills to estimating and modeling efficiency, productivity, valuation and allocation of natural resources and ecosystem services in the areas of food systems: food security, agricultural productivity, rural poverty, and international trade. She has undertaken research in the climate system: particularly stakeholder issues, resilience building, adaptive capacity aspects of climate change; water, land and forest degradation from urban and rural poor’s perspectives. All her work, till to date, has been pertaining to governance, efficiency and policy in the Indian context.
