The Spring semester has started with several SASNET-related activities with speakers from across the world giving presentations on current and past events in South Asia. Two PhD students at Lund University have received travel grants to do field work in India on water-related issues and biodiversity studies. Congratulations to Sahan Subramanian at LUCSUS and Fainaz Inamdeen at the Department of Water Resources Engineering. We wish them both the best for their travels.

It is with great anticipation that we are approaching our annual SASNET lecture with Professor Shirin Rai on May 23 at Eden’s auditorium at Lund University. Professor Rai will talk about “State, Architecture and Aesthetics - reconfiguring ‘the people’ through India’s new parliament”. We are delighted to have Shirin here and hope her talk will generate great interest across the University and among the public. Please join us for this event. Refreshments will be served.

SASNET is further sponsoring the Political Ecology Network conference (POLLEN24), which is set to take place between three locations, including Lund, on 10-12 June 2024. Researcher-activist and writer, Manshi Asher, will attend the Lund conference. Manshi lives in the Western Himalayan Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Over the last two and a half decades her work has involved documentation, campaigning and activism on environmental justice, forest and land rights issues. In 2009 she co-founded the Himdhara Collective, an autonomous environment group that extends solidarity to Himalayan communities’ voices to protect their livelihoods and landscapes. 

In the first week of September 2024, the Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety at Lund University is organizing a SASNET co-funded Summer School on ‘Gender, Disasters and Climate Risk’. The Summer School provides a platform to create a strong pedagogical base that is action oriented towards capacity enhancement and gender secure environments. 

We are currently planning a number of events for this Autumn. SASNET will organize symposia, workshops, conferences and seminars in Lund and are planning for some events in South Asia as well, not least in relation to the outcome of the Indian elections. More information about this will follow before the summer.  I wish you all the best for the months to come and hope to see many of you at our own and co-organized events. 

Catarina Kinnvall,
Director of SASNET