- Date
- Thursday 25 Apr 2024, 16:30 - 17:45
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Room 4.26
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
What is the impact of 50 years of agrarian change on the relationship of people to nature and wildlife? Dr Karma Ura will discuss these changes in this special Political Ecology seminar.
In this special Political Ecology seminar, Dr Karma Ura of the Centre of Bhutan & GNH Studies will discuss 50 years of agrarian changes involving shifts in labour, changes in land rights and uses, and changes in the composition of livestock.
He will discuss the impacts on the relationship of people to nature and wildlife, and the impacts on contemporary food habits.
He will further analyse these transformations within the context of political narratives about elusive food self-sufficiency and increasing marketization.
About the speaker
Karma Ura is a respected Bhutanese scholar, historian, heterodox economist and one of the main architects of the Gross National Happiness framework (GNH).
He is also a writer, a painter and a scholar of Buddhism. Karma Ura has written several books – most recently, a two-volume monograph on Bhutan’s social history of modernization, Bhutan: The Unremembered Nation (Oxford UP). He has been a visiting scholar in various institutions, including Oxford and Nagoya University.
Karma Ura worked for the Ministry of Planning for twelve years before becoming the Director of the Centre for Bhutan & GNH Studies (CBS) in 2008. The CBS has been at the forefront of deepening national and global understandings of Bhutan’s home-grown development philosophy of GNH and conducting multidisciplinary research about Bhutan. GNH has attracted substantial attention worldwide, including romantic projections from outsiders.
He is currently a Fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg.