Publics@IIHS with Richa Kumar | What We Eat and What We Value: Re-Embedding Markets in Ecology

About the talk:
Social scientists have written a great deal about the social embeddedness of markets. In this talk the speaker would like to draw attention to the ecological embeddedness of markets-about the materials economy that we live in, live off. The markets that we have created, especially for agriculture and our food systems, exist outside of ecology, outside of nature. They work on the principle that nature by itself has no value and no limits, and they have facilitated a materials economy that is destroying our planet along with our health. The speaker argues that healing ourselves and our planet requires us to re-embed our understanding of markets within ecology. This implies taking seriously, the three D’s--Degrowth, Diversity and Decentralisation, but also reconsidering what constitutes as value.
About the Speaker:
Richa Kumar is Associate Professor of Sociology and Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT Delhi) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and holds a position as Associate Faculty, School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi. Her research and teaching interests are in the Sociology of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition, Science and Technology Studies, and Rural and Agrarian Policy. She is a co-author of the State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020 and her current research is on the impact of monoculture farming on farm systems, the environment and human health. Her book, "Rethinking Revolutions: Soyabean, Choupals and the Changing Countryside in Central India" was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. She is a recipient of the inaugural Elizabeth Adiseshiah Memorial Award (2019), the New India Fellowship (2010) and is a member of the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS). She completed her PhD from the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.