Blurred Boundaries: Identity and Rights in the Forested Landscapes of Gudalur, Tamil Nadu, SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2017-02-03

Manasi Karthik - Tamil Nadu offers a critical analysis of the politics of claim-making vis-a-vis the Forest Rights Act (FRA) by illustrating how three distinct political actors in Gudalur, Tamil Nadu, have used the FRA. In our analysis of the FRA, we take the law not as an immutable category but rather as a political instrument that various groups use to assert their identities and political imaginaries.
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In SEED (SOAS Political Ecology of Environment and Development) (https://goo.gl/Lbh2MR)  we ask the big questions around the role of the current social, political and economic order in producing environmental challenges in the first place. Our group a takes a political ecology approach to understanding global environmental change, and we actively consider alternatives that require fundamental restructuring, and which go beyond mitigation. This relies on interdisciplinary approaches that fully integrate humanities and social sciences in ways cut across traditional boundaries of Development Studies, Law, Politics and International Relations, Area Studies and Economics.