Radhika Govindrajan Talk: ‘Spectral Justice: Multispecies Haunting and Accountability in Himalayan India’

The third in a series of talks planned collaboratively by SPAM, CARG, and CRIE: Critical Anthropocene Speaker Series: Global, Decolonial, Critical Race Approaches for a Multispecies World—

University of Washington Associate Professor Radhika Govindrajan presents Spectral Justice: Multispecies Haunting and Accountability in Himalayan India, which will explore the topics from her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018). 

Radhika Govindrajan is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her research is motivated by a longstanding interest in understanding how human relationships with nonhumans in South Asia are variously drawn into and shape broader issues of cultural, political, and social relevance: religious nationalism; elite projects of environmental conservation and animal-rights; everyday ethical action in a time of environmental decline; and people’s struggle for social and political justice in the face of caste discrimination, patriarchal domination, and state violence and neglect.