Abstract
Drawing on Indigenous forest worlds in India and the incarcerated intellectual-activists who struggled alongside them, this year’s Eilert Sundt Lecture develops a politics of planetary care that holds human and more-than-human worlds together while confronting the social processes through which some lives are rendered expendable.
It asks how we might build more liveable futures while reckoning with the profound inequalities that determine whose lives, labour and environments are valued—and whose are extinguished.
In response to our planetary crisis, we are increasingly asked to decentre the human, recognise non-human agency and imagine more-than-human futures. But what might this leave out asks Professor Alpa Shah.
Biography
Professor Alpa Shah is the Chair of Social Anthropology at University of Oxford and is Fellow of All Souls College. She is author of The Incarecerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (2024); Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (2018); In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (2010) and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste and Class in 21st Century, India (2010).
Shah is winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize, the 2025 Times of India Author award and a twice-finalist (2019 and 2024) of the Orwell Political Writing Book Prize and also winner of the 2022 ERC Public Engagement Prize. Her work has a broad reach across the social sciences and humanities and her engaged scholarship demonstrates the wider relevance of anthropological perspectives to contemporary global challenges and shows the importance of academics taking active role in public debates.
Programme
- 14:15 Welcome and opening words by Dean Anne Julie Semb
- 14:20 Introduction by Head of Department Thorgeir Kolshus
- 14:30 Lecture
- 15:30 Q & A
- 15:55 Round off by Dean Anne Julie Semb