Problems of Control and the Flood Pulse in South Asia by Rohan D'Souza скачать в хорошем качестве

Problems of Control and the Flood Pulse in South Asia by Rohan D'Souza

Rohan D'Souza is a distinguished environmental historian. He is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS) at Kyoto University, Japan. He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (2006). His edited books include The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011) and Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive Essays (2012). He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex), a Visiting Fellow at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University) and at the University of Pennsylvania About the Keynote: River control in South Asia, especially from the nineteenth century, rested on the confidence of prediction. In such a reckoning, harnessing vast flowing rivers could be achieved because their average behaviors and statistical regularities enabled manipulation. In the context of a warming world, however, the hydrosphere no longer offers previous predictabilities. The inevitable ‘loss of control’ has, in fact, in recent years, forced a conceptual churning over the very idea of the river itself. And at the heart of this urgency to rethink the meaning of flows is the re-discovery of the centrality of the notion of the flood pulse. Professor Dsouza’s talk will explore not only how environmental historians and the environmental humanities are building on a biological critique of the volumetric channel but, critically as well, unsettling the notion of the river itself.