IITGandhinagar to organise a three-day international conference on Ecology

 

Gandhinagar: The Humanities and Social Sciences discipline at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) is organising a three-day international conference on ‘Affect, Embodiment and Ecology: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives’ from March 2-4, 2020. The conference is co-sponsored by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and will comprise panel discussions by participants and three keynote talks by eminent experts.

In our rapidly changing ecological scenario, it becomes important to understand how ecology affects mind, body and environment and what response that affect produces in the human and the non-human. Maintaining this as the central theme, the conference will have multi-disciplinary presentations from faculty and doctoral students in subjects like linguistics, literature, anthropology, history, animal-human relations, phenomenology and space, and ecology and environment.

There will be three keynotes across the three days of the event. The first keynote will be delivered by Prof Mark Byron from the University of Sydney, Australia, on “Between Bone, Stone, and Wood: Embodiment, Ecology, and Materialism in Contemporary Literature”. Prof Nathan Badenoch from Kyoto University and Prof Toshiki Osada from Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan, will jointly give the second keynote on “Expressiveness and Affect: Everyday poetics in natural landscapes”. The third and final keynote talk will be given by Prof Anindya Sinha from National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, on “Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Affective Ethologies of Primate Lives”.

Presentations will be made by participants from ten different states of India, representing universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University; IISER Bhopal; IIT Madras; Karnatak University; IIT Gandhinagar; University of Lucknow; St Xavier’s University Kolkata; English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad; Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education, Mumbai; Deccan College, Pune; and many others. The conference will also have differently-abled participants, one of whom will make a Skype presentation while another will present in person.