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 and Eszter Erdosi (PhD candidates 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 organisers: e.erdosi@sms.ed.ac.uk OR a.palat@sms.ed.ac.uk
Diana More, BP or not BP? Statement on the Reopening of the British Museum, 2020, photograph,
Digital image courtesy of Digital image courtesy of Diana More (all rights reserved)
Biographies
Eszter Erdosi is a PhD candidate at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and co-organiser of the Climate & Colonialism Reading Group at the Paul Mellon Centre. Her research interests lie at the intersection of animal studies and art history, with a focus on the representation of politicised relationships of care between humans and other-than-humans in contemporary art. She is the Postgraduate Convenor of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Research Network, and a member of the Ecologies of Care working group, supported by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory. Eszter holds a BA in History of Art and French from the University of Bristol and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute.
Anisha Palat is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and 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.