Providing insights into future ways of being-in-the-world – Book ‘Ecological Entanglements’ released at IIT Gandhinagar

Gandhinagar: Ahead of World Earth Day, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) released a book ‘Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care’ on April 13, 2023. The book is edited by Profs Ambika Aiyadurai, Arka Chattopadhyay, and Nishaant Choksi, faculty members of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN. Published by Orient BlackSwan, the book calls for new ways to apprehend the ecological crisis by formulating a framework that integrates social, material, and cultural dimensions of ecology.

The book argues that ecology is thoroughly entangled with affective, communicative, and embodied practices that provide a sense of how one can not only understand, but also care for the other. The book is an anthology of 15 chapters contributed by wildlife biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and scholars of literature and geography. Written by 22 scholars from 15 universities, from across India and overseas, including Japan, Australia, and UK, the book’s multidisciplinary studies address the questions from human-nonhuman interactions and provide insights into future ways of being-in-the-world.

Releasing the book, Prof Rajat Moona, Director, IITGN, highlighted the need for scholars from different disciplines to address issues of environmental crisis and to work together to look for better understanding of environmental issues. Speaking on the occasion, Prof Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist, emphasised the need to go beyond one’s disciplinary boundaries to examine the ecological interrelations of humans and nonhumans.

Along similar lines, Prof Arka Chattopadhyay, faculty of literary studies and philosophy, highlighted complicating the idea of care by decentering humans and underlined the different affective expressions to show the shared embodied spaces of the humans and nonhumans. Prof Nishaant Choksi, a linguistic anthropologist, stated that the uniqueness of the essays in the volume is that they reflect ideas from different disciplines and discuss the questions of affect, body, embodiment, care, language, and interspecies relations. The book hopes to develop a new and composite concept of ecology by acknowledging the entanglements of human and nonhuman in embodied spaces and languages to construct an ethic of caring.