About this Event
Featuring: Krupa Rajangam, Fulbright Scholar, Historic Preservation Department, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Conservation in South Asia, including preservation and cultural landscape work, necessarily intersects with the day-to-day lives of communities living in-and-around both legally-protected and unprotected heritage sites and conservation landscapes. At the very least, in discourse, if not always in practice, both policy and frameworks have evolved from questioning the role of communities to recognizing their central role in achieving sustainable and inclusive conservation outcomes. This shift is accompanied by persistent and problematic chronocentric imaginations of people as ‘native’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’. This talk examines the social, spatial and environmental consequences of such perceptions, particularly for marginalized groups and individuals.
In this talk I present vignettes from my long-standing engagements with diverse conservation landscapes in South India: Hampi World Heritage Site, northern Karnataka, Bengaluru metropolitan region, southern Karnataka, and the Tamirabarani River basin, southern Tamil Nadu. I observe that within each of these landscapes and among the same set of social actors one can witness the good, bad, and ugly of community engagement – its positive, negative, and problematic aspects – unfolding as various social actors, including heritage experts, officials, NGOs, and resident communities, navigate the compulsions and contradictions of conservation on-ground.
Speaker bio: As social geographer, heritage management consultant, and conservation architect I have over two decades of field-based experience in diverse aspects of heritage making, management, and development, in India, UK and, the USA. I advocate for a more informed approach to conservation practice and pedagogy alongside a more grounded and balanced theorization.
As an interdisciplinary researcher my work bridges conservation, anthropology, and geography to examine how conservation actors and conservation landscapes are intertwined with issues of social and environmental justice in everyday life, either knowingly or unintentionally, beyond questions of heritage politics.
My doctoral scholarship drew on both my professional experience and ethnography at Hampi World Heritage Site to critique UNESCO World Heritage management structures on-ground as a means to govern people and landscapes. My work has been published in peer-reviewed international journals including The Journal of Social Archaeology, Change over Time, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, Journal of South Asian Development, and South Asia Studies.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
East-West Center (John A. Burns Hall), 1601 East-West Road, Honolulu, United States
USD 0.00
