Saturday, February 10, 2007
Environmental justice is topic of Distinguished Scholar lecture
 Dr. S. Ravi Rajan, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, will present the 2006-07 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Scholar Lecture, “Sustenance, Security, and Suffrage: A Perspective on Environmental Justice,” at 7 p.m. Monday, February 19, 2007, in Mitchell Auditorium in the Health Professions Center.A humanist and social scientist, Rajan is the author of Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2006), numerous scholarly articles, and periodic essays for the popular news media; served as the president of the board of directors of Pesticide Action Network, North America (PANNA); and co-founded the Bhopal Group for Information and Action. His research focuses on environmental issues in governance, corporate responsibility, globalization, entrepreneurship, technology choice, and risk and disaster management. The lecture will draw upon Rajan’s research for a book to be entitled, Sustenance, Security and Suffrage: The Theme of Justice in Environmental Thought. “In essence, it argues that what distinguishes the environmentalism of the affluent from that of the poor is the latter’s emphasis on the importance, for life, of human dignity and fairness, of access to good environments, and a concomitant removal of bad environments,” Rajan wrote of his work. “The talk goes on to undertake a political theoretical discussion of the centrality of environmental conditions for quality of life, justice, and fairness. In doing so, it also examines the challenges posed to classical theories of democracy and citizenship by new and emerging techno-political hybrids.” For more information, call the Sociology Department at 812/461-5264. |
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