From Dr. Karine Gagne:

What is a drought?

In the Indian Himalayas, agropastoral communities are struggling with the impacts of climate change, in particular, glacier recession and reduced snowfall precipitations. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the region of Zanskar, this presentation explores how farmers’ experiences of water stress are exacerbated by the technocratic approach of the Indian state to drought.

Drawing on scholarship that approaches drought as an ontologically multiple object, I examine how drought is enacted by the state and farmers through different practices. While the state’s approach to drought fails to recognize the complex topography of the Himalayas, impacted farmers remain invisible as the drought they experience does not take a recognized measurable form. Farmers’ claims for drought support must therefore proceed through a bureaucratic chain so that the production of a report successfully expresses the existence of a drought.

The experience of Zanskar farmers, I argue, is woven into a marginalization undergirded by limited technocratic understanding of climate-related processes.

This is a hybrid event, attend in person at LR Wilson Hall or attend online