Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Pavithra Vasudevan "In the Crucible: Metaphor and Materiality in Storytelling Capitalism”
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Pavithra Vasudevan is an Assistant Professor with the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies, and a faculty member of the University of Texas Feminist Geography Research Collective. Her scholarship and teaching are concerned with how racialized peoples and landscapes are devalued in capitalism and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. As a critical and feminist geographer, her work examines structural oppression through the embodied experiences, everyday lives and political practices of communities threatened by hazardous environments.
Dr. Vasudevan earned her Ph.D. in Geography in 2018 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was awarded dissertation fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Society of Women Geographers, and the Center for the Study of the American South. She received the Graduate Education Advancement Board’s Impact Award for her research on the racialized burden of toxicity in the aluminum company town of Badin, North Carolina. Her approach to engaged scholarship is rooted in Critical Performance Ethnography, utilizing arts-based methods to develop collaborations with affected communities. Her book manuscript in progress, Exposing Aluminum: Death and Desire in Racial Capitalism, centers Black feminist and decolonial theory in examining the lived experiences of workers and their communities who constitute the global production network of aluminum.
Dr. Vasudevan is particularly interested in collective knowledge production that bridges critical thought and political organizing. Her work is deeply informed by her background in community organizing, as well as lifelong study of movement practices, including Bharata Natyam and Odissi dance forms, the martial art of Aikido, and yoga. Prior to graduate school, Dr. Vasudevan worked in New York City for seven years as a professional dancer, and developed programs and curricula for high school youth.
Dr. Vasudevan has published in Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography (forthcoming), Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Area, and Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. In addition, she co-edited a special issue on “Race, Biopolitics and the Future” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and has co-authored chapters for the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice and the Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies.