Guest Researcher
Nandita Badami is an anthropologist interested in how dominant concepts of rationality and human agency are being reworked as a new generation turns to practices of divination—astrology, the Tarot, the I Ching—in a world marked by economic, environmental and political instability. At IRI THESys she will be working on a project titled “The Other Planetary”, in which she expands the recent “planetary turn” to consider how anthropocene discourse might benefit from engagement with the concept of nature that predates scientific reason, as understood by contemporary practioners of the divinatory arts.
Research Interests
- Political Anthropology
- Environmental Humanities
- History of Rationality
Project
The Other Planetary
Selected Publications
2021 Let There Be Light (Or, In Defense of Darkness). South Atlantic Quarterly, 120 (1): 51-61. (Link).
2019 From the Archives: The Future in our Disciplinary Past. American Anthropologist website. (Link).
2018 Informality as Fix: Repurposing Jugaad in the Post-Crisis Economy. Third Text, 32(1): 46-54. (Link).
2018 Solarpunking Speculative Futures. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website. (Link).
2017 Flatpack Sunlight. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website. (Link: please scroll down two the third piece).
2013 A Vision of Waste: The Political Imagery of Tents. In Sarai Reader 09: Projections, ed. Raqs Media Collective and Shveta Sarda. CSDS-Sarai. (Link: please scroll down to section two).
