Huge congratulations to GSEJ founding member Dr Aparajita Mukhopadhyay on winning an AHRC Research Fellowship grant. For the next 4 years, Dr. Mukhopadhyay will lead the project, Mediating Imperial Science: Economic Botany and Agrarian Ecology in Colonial South Asia.
The project investigates the impact of economic botany on the agrarian ecology of colonial South Asia (modern Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) through the lens of South Asians’ own participation and involvement in an imperially driven enterprise. It will produce empirically rich and historically contextualised new knowledge of how South Asians’ participation and involvement had enduring and ongoing implications for the agrarian regime and ecology of the region.
In collaboration with the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, Dr. Mukhopadhyay’s research will a enable a crucial step towards decolonising conservation and promoting the vital conservation commitments worldwide by underlining the mediating role of a range of diverse stakeholders.