







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1 (1): 117–120, April 2018 

 
REPORT  
 

The Duke Kunshan Conference on Environmental 
Justice and Sustainable Citizenship, 22–24 May 2017 
 

Amita Baviskar  
 
In the past decade, the environmental humanities have emerged as an 
exciting new rubric for examining relations between nature and culture. In 
large part, this development stems from the consolidation of the idea of the 
Anthropocene as an unprecedented epoch that demands new ways of 
thinking. It is widely agreed that the Anthropocene collapses the 
conventional separation of humans from their environment, and that its 
crisis of climate change calls for new forms of interdisciplinary work. Due 
to this epistemological emphasis, the environmental humanities have come 
into their own as a field that brings together the natural sciences, 
philosophy, literary criticism, history, geography, anthropology, and art in 
an attempt to integrate discussions that have hitherto occurred in largely 
separate spheres. 

So far, discussions organized under the banner of the environmental 
humanities have generally occurred in North America and Europe, 
geographical loci that have shaped the character of the conversation as well. 
Recognizing the limits of a Eurocentric dialogue, even across disciplines, 
the University of Cape Town in South Africa has started an environmental 
humanities programme that tries to include perspectives from the Global 
South. However, scholars of Asian societies, and those based in Asia, have 
been slow to follow this lead even though this large continent, with its rich 
and varied ecologies and cultures, is fertile ground for delving into the 
subject. 

 
 Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University Enclave, Delhi 110007, 
amita.baviskar@gmail.com 

Copyright © Baviskar 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.27  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.27


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [118] 

To address this gap, the Global Asia Initiative at Duke University, together 
with Duke Kunshan University, held a conference on environmental justice 
and sustainable citizenship in May 2017. The meeting brought together 
scholars and practitioners who work on environmental questions in China 
and India from a variety of disciplinary perspectives for three days of 
informative and stimulating discussion. The conference aimed at starting a 
dialogue on comparable and connected issues regarding the environment in 
China and India, Asia’s largest nation-states on the highway of economic 
growth, whose ecological footprints will have an overwhelming impact on 
the future of the Anthropocene. 

Prasenjeet Duara conceptualized and designed the conference. In keeping 
with the commitment to highlight Asian concerns as well as conceptual 
frames, Duara focused on ‘sustainable citizenship’, arguing that human 
welfare, or the right of citizens to develop their capabilities to the fullest, 
still constitutes the unfinished agenda of public action in the continent. 
Unlike the Global North—where levels of affluence enable most citizens to 
lead lives of relative comfort, dignity, and freedom—China and India still 
struggle to achieve social and economic well-being for many of their 
citizens. Both countries contend with extreme inequalities within their 
populations and ever-larger ecological burdens that are disproportionately 
borne by the underclass. ‘Ecological justice’, thus, emerges as a critical 
theme with which sustainable citizenship must be coupled. Since political 
and epistemological differences sometimes make it difficult to directly 
engage with either ‘sustainable citizenship’ or ‘environmental justice’ across 
Asia, the conference was careful to include a range of voices and 
vocabularies to address these themes. At the same time, the conference 
organizers recognized that the articulation of the problem in terms of 
citizenship and justice—concepts that transnational academic discourses 
usually derive from Western political philosophy—needs to be critically 
examined from the perspectives afforded by different philosophical 
traditions and political histories. 

The conference began by focusing on contemporary urbanization in China 
and India, a process that encapsulates the pursuit of economic growth and 
prosperity and the persistent inequalities and ecological problems associated 
with it. In his overview of urbanization, Michael Douglass inserted climate 
change into the picture, complicating conventional analytical frames about 
environment and development. Ka-ming Wu and Amita Baviskar examined 
urban ecologies from the perspectives of migrant workers in Beijing and 
Delhi. They considered those displaced from rural areas and the systemic 
biases they encounter in cities—denied their civic rights while compelled to 
labour in insecure, ill-paid, jobs as waste recyclers, rickshaw pullers, 
vendors, and domestic workers. Environmental injustice in rural China was 



[119] Amita Baviskar 

the subject of Ralph Litzinger’s paper on coal mining and its burden of 
disease and death, aspects that are not considered when discussing energy 
choices in the context of climate change. 

Climate change has altered the conversation not only around cities but also 
around water. Now that dynamic hydraulic processes seem even more 
uncertain, efforts to capture and control water have accelerated. In a paper 
that resonated with Indian experiences, Pichamon Yeophantong looked at 
Chinese dam-building in Cambodia and Myanmar, its environmental and 
social impacts, and the counter-strategies used by anti-dam campaigns. 
Arupjyoti Saikia described the changing landscape of the Brahmaputra basin 
and its current challenges. Chris Courtney focused on the industrialization 
of the farm-fisheries complex in the Yangtze wetlands and the catastrophic 
advance of an invasive crayfish species.  

How human interventions create new opportunities and vulnerabilities for 
animals and plants was also the subject of Jeffrey Nicolaisen’s paper on the 
Galluscene (the Age of the Domestic Fowl), which discussed the 
environmental humanities injunction to replace human-centric analytical 
frames with multispecies ethnography. Pradip Krishen traced the career of 
Prosopis juliflora, a hardy tree from Central America that has taken over large 
parts of arid and semi-arid India, and described his work as an ecological 
gardener struggling to restore indigenous flora in degraded landscapes. 
Yuan-chih Lung addressed the threats faced by giant pandas due to natural 
events such as gregarious bamboo flowering and human-led habitat 
destruction. 

Rapid and uncontrollable ecological change can evoke a range of responses. 
Robert Weller showed how the destruction of village temples and graves on 
the urban periphery has shaken the spiritual ecosystem, leading to 
pioneering species of religious practices that seek to establish themselves on 
disturbed ground. Chris Coggins described the revival of village-managed 
fengshui forests, sacred groves whose belief systems had been suppressed 
during the Maoist period, while Jianhua Ayoe Wang showed how sacred 
landscapes coincided with more recently constituted nature reserves. Sam 
Geall discussed the rise of environmental journalism in China and the 
negotiation of new partnerships between the state, corporations, and 
NGOs. Erika Weinthal explored the motivations of ‘citizen-scientists’, or 
local volunteers mapping human-wildlife conflicts in Rajasthan. Kathinka 
Fürst outlined how air pollution in China has provoked artists and film-
makers. William Schaefer presented the work of Chinese photographers 
Zhang Jin and Zhang Kechun, whose techniques and artistic tactics mirror 
the altered states of nature on which they focus. 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [120] 

Among other topics discussed at the conference were the philosophical 
roots of animal activism (papers by Chia-ju Chang and Haiyan Lee); 
colonialism and the climate change debate (Rohan D’Souza); the insertion 
of Dalits into environmentalist narratives (Mukul Sharma); and the 
relationship between the material properties of wood and its social and 
cultural life (Meena Khandelwal). As the first attempt to chart the diverse 
elements that may be combined to constitute the environmental humanities 
in Asia, this was a remarkable endeavour that, wisely, did not end by 
attempting to tie everything together. Instead, it concluded with a visit to 
the historic water town of Suzhou where the multiple threads of 
conversations from the conference could be continued over dinner. 


