Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
April 24–25, 2025 | Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
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Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
April 24–25, 2025
Landscapes of Intensification
Moderated by Ryan Jobson, Department of Anthropology and CEGU, The University of Chicago
Friday, April 25, 2025, 1:45–2:45pm
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Science Research Building
(2nd Floor, 1126 E. 59th St.)
Tremors of Freedom: Earthquakes, Dams, and Self-Determination in Modern India
Sachaet Pandey, Department of History, The University of Chicago
Sachaet Pandey is a PhD candidate in the University of Chicago’s history department. His current work follows the transformations effected by hydroelectricity in Western India, and examines their conceptual foundations.
In 1967, Western India was shaken, and the scientific community worldwide bestirred by the largest earthquake to ever be triggered by human activity. As the dust settled, disagreeing geologists came to a settlement: this earthquake was a product of the Koyna hydroelectric dam, even today India’s largest by installed generating capacity, and fondly referred to as the region’s lifeline. The dam may seem to stand alone in the mountains in which it lies, but its history and everyday activity connect it to a much larger electric grid that has pulsated across Maharashtra for over a century. The tremors it occasions, evanescent as they may be, and recurrent as they are, are also historical products; unintended creations of history and nature, they point us towards a past in which human beings struggled to transform seasonal rainfall into a perennial source of energy: they highlight the limits and perils of this attempt to metabolize the gifts of nature.
The growth of the hydroelectric system of which Koyna was the culmination was conditioned by a diversity of factors, but one of the most important was the desire to be free from the uncertainty and seasonality of rainfall. I will briefly investigate the foundations of this desire in anticolonial nationalist thought, before examining how capitalists and bureaucrats struggled to actualize this freedom by building progressively larger dams to meet growing demands for energy. In an environment in which unpredictable rainfall constantly thwarted their plans, this process of scaling reached its conclusion in the construction of a dam that cannot hold all the water it was designed to hold, lest it trigger an earthquake that would destabilize the dam itself.
Sachaet Pandey is a PhD candidate in the University of Chicago’s history department. His current work follows the transformations effected by hydroelectricity in Western India, and examines their conceptual foundations.
From Molecule to Market: Racial Hierarchies, Geologic Flows, and Louisiana’s Petro-Landscapes
Robin McDowell, Department of History, Wesleyan University
Robin McDowell is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University and incoming Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. Her first book project, Black Bayou: Race, Ecology, and the Transformation of Louisiana Wetlands, explores historical dimensions of environmental racism and visions for environmental justice in southeast Louisiana. She a practicing artist and designer, as well as a member of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a multi-institutional Black feminist digital humanities collective.
This paper examines human encounters with petroleum in Louisiana’s wetlands, spanning the geological formation of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River valleys to modern extraction. It foregrounds how molecular processes intersect with formations of racial capitalism, with a focus on the parishes (counties) of Louisiana’s “Cajun Coast”—the coastline of the northern Gulf of Mexico between New Orleans and the Texas state border—where oil, salt, and sugar production are tethered to centuries of coerced and co-opted Black and Indigenous labor and environmental knowledge. Today, active oil drilling, salt mining operations, and heritage tourism on the sites of former sugar and rice plantations have displaced communities of color, resulting in a petro-landscape built on exploitative labor regimes and ongoing environmental injustices.
Robin McDowell is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University and incoming Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. Her first book project, Black Bayou: Race, Ecology, and the Transformation of Louisiana Wetlands, explores historical dimensions of environmental racism and visions for environmental justice in southeast Louisiana. She a practicing artist and designer, as well as a member of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a multi-institutional Black feminist digital humanities collective.