Research Projects & Networks

The Climate & Colonialism Reading Group

The Climate & Colonialism Reading Group is part of the multi-year Climate & Colonialism project led by Dr Sria Chatterjee at the Paul Mellon Centre. For more information on future events and information about readings, please sign up to the mailing list.

This interdisciplinary Reading Group aims to provide a space for discussion and reflection about the role of the arts and visual cultures in discourses around climate and colonialism. It hopes to foster a dialogue that begins to question systems of oppression that have contributed to the colonial project and its relationships to ecology. The selection of texts for the Reading Group will foreground ecofeminist, Black, Brown and Indigenous scholarship that focuses on the intersections between the environment, extraction and colonial systems and also histories of decolonisation and speculative imaginaries of human and more-than-human ecologies. It is open to everyone.

The Reading Group will be hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in collaboration with Anisha Palat (PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh). Sessions will take place online with some space for hybrid events, allowing people to attend regardless of time zone and geographical location. The Reading Group will meet once every two months, beginning in February 2023.

More information on future events and access to readings will become available. If you have any questions, please write to the organiser Anisha Palat: [email protected]

Line of people holding black banner that reads Colonialism

Diana More, BP or not BP? Statement on the Reopening of the British Museum, 2020, photograph,

Anisha Palat has a PhD in History of Art from the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and is co-organiser of the Climate & Colonialism Reading Group at the Paul Mellon Centre. Anisha’s research focuses on the image of the cow in contemporary Indian art, and its intersections with caste and animal studies. She has presented her research at conferences and workshops around the world, most recently at UW Madison’s Annual Conference on South Asia, Towards Ecocritical Art History: Methods and Practices, held at the University of Vienna. She chaired a panel for the Association for Art History (AAH) Annual Conference (April 2022) titled Visual Cultures of Protest: Art and Resistance in South Asia. In addition to her research, Anisha was part of the editorial team for the South Asianist journal, run by the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh.

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