Special Guest Seminar

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This Special Guest seminar brings together two exciting talks about alternative forms of organizing socio-economic relations in the Anthropocene. Our guest speakers are Dr. Subarna De and Dr. Stevienna de Saille.

Dr. Subarna De (University of Groningen) is an environmental humanities researcher working on indigeneity and bioregionalism. Her ethnographic research is situated at the interface of cultural anthropology, human geography, environmental history, and environmental humanities scholarship. She combines interdisciplinary approaches from indigenous, heritage, food, and environmental studies and employs social science methods and community engagement to work on public environmental humanities projects. Her career includes several fellowships, teaching, and research roles at the Madras Christian College, Mazoon University College, Rachel Carson Centre, Centre for Arts and Indigenous Studies, and the University of Groningen. She also explores alternative forms of research communication and dissemination, mainly through environmental consulting, creative writing, and photography.

The Bioregional Food System and the Sustainability Framework

Abstract: The twelfth UN sustainability goal ensures responsible food production and consumption. The global food system plays a vital role in climate change, biodiverse integrity, changes in the land system, and land and freshwater uses. It thus becomes crucial to consider sustainable forms of food production and consumption to return to Earth’s limit. In this presentation, I will explore how the bioregional food system practised in the coffee plantations of Kodagu (the indigenous name of Coorg), located in the state of Karnataka in southern India, response to the Anthropocene in the Global South while ensuring a sustainable food framework. To counter the colonial establishment of the coffee plantations, toward the end of the twentieth century, the Kodava people started growing native crops on the coffee plantations. Understanding bioregional eating as eating practices that depend entirely on the ingredients that are naturally available in the specific region, I will discuss how bioregional eating in Kodagu determines the culture of the place and provides a bioregional identity to the Kodava people. In doing so, I will discuss some of the essential native species of the bioregional food system of Kodagu and explain how they inform traditional practices and have gradually evolved as significant ecological and social markers of the place and the community.

Dr. Stevienna de Saille (University of Sheffield) is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, where she leads the ‘Human Futures’ research theme as part of the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman). A science and technology studies scholar, her research also draws from a broad range of approaches including social movement theory, intersectional gender and disability studies, and heterodox economics, and has focussed on the technical fields of reprogenetics and robotics. Her current programme of research, 'Robots in a Human Future', uses LEGO Serious Play to bring engineers, care users and local councils together to investigate the implications of introducing robots and AI into the UK’s adult social care system. She is a founder of the Fourth Quadrant Research Network and led their award-winning book, “Responsibility Beyond Growth”, which argues for a different approach to the economics of innovation. She also serves on the executive committee of the UK Association for Studies of Innovation, Science and Technology (AsSIST-UK)

"Responsibility" as a challenge to "growth, growth, growth": Innovating from the Fourth Quadrant

Abstract: Responsible innovation (RI) was originally conceived as a way of shaping innovation towards filling real social needs, rather than merely increasing profits and GDP. However, the process of embedding these ideas into science funding policies, particularly as Responsible Research and Innovation in the EU, has instead served to strengthen the very same demands for growth at any cost that RI was meant to challenge. Initially presented as a matrix which contrasts responsibility with irresponsibility and innovation with stagnation, the quadrant representing responsible innovation continues to be discussed while that of responsible stagnation remains largely unexplored. Yet taking this ‘fourth quadrant’ seriously creates space to question the political economy in which RI is embedded and to consider both 'responsibility' and 'innovation' in their broadest sense, including non-market oriented (and even anti-market oriented) goods, services and social arrangements which deliberately do not increase the kind of throughput measured by GDP, but do provide immense societal and environmental benefits. In this talk, I will examine how thinking within this fourth quadrant -- as a necessary component of RI, rather than an argument against it -- can facilitate truly innovative approaches to crucial questions about maintaining social progress within our planetary limitations.