Monday Seminar:
Sandhya Ganapathy
UW System Fellow (2010-2011)
Anthropology, UW-Stevens Point
This presentation is drawn from a chapter in my book project, Partial Alliances: Environmentalism, Development, and Indigeneity in Alaska. The book presents an ethnographically grounded analysis of contemporary environmental contestation in Alaska, with particular attention to relationships that exist between Alaskan Native communities and environmental NGOs. In this presentation, I explore the role that place (specifically “Alaska”) plays in shaping these environmental contestations, which are themselves often translocal in nature. I consider the ways that “Alaska” and other iconic landscapes become constituted in the spatial imaginations of geographically dispersed publics and what that portends for more grounded engagements with and struggles over place.
Sandhya Ganapathy joined the faculty at UW-Stevens Point in 2008 as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She finished her doctorate in anthropology from Temple University (2008) and is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation fieldwork. She has published her work in the journal Social Analysis and in Anthropology News. She received support for her research from the Wenner Gren Foundation, Temple University and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.