Upcoming programs - The Skin of Chitwan

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Greetings all+++

We have two programs coming up this week that are accompanying our on-going online exhibition The Skin of Chitwan.

We hope you can join us!

- Team NPL

Gut Microbiome: Using Genetics to Understand Indigenous Nepali Histories and Change

Wednesday, 26th Aug 2020

7:00 - 8:30 pm NST

Aashish Jha, PhD is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at New York University Abu Dhabi. He uses genomics to decipher human population histories and microbiomes. Some of his recent work looks at the human gut (intestine), which contains a diverse community of bacteria. This bacterial community changes rapidly in response to diet and environment.

Many indigenous communities across Nepal who have historically foraged for food in the forests or grown their own food —are undergoing rapid lifestyle changes, including the Tharu, Raute, Raji and Chepang communities. Aashish has characterized the gut microbiota of these four communities, to investigate whether shifts from traditional lifestyles have resulted in changes in their gut bacteria. The results of his studies demonstrate that changes in their gut microbiome strongly reflect their divergence from their traditional foraging lifestyles. Many of the bacteria that differ across lifestyles are diet dependent but they also demonstrated that environmental factors, such as sources of drinking water, are strongly associated with the gut microbiome in Nepali populations.

How is large-scale gut microbiome reconfiguration impacting the health of the indigenous populations? What kind of scientific evidence and archival records make indigenous claims about the past possible? What do we accept to be evidence and what do we not? What is the role of other forms of knowledge that fall outside the western scientific framework?

Please register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwrdOqqrTssHdawBZ2lCUpkrPeWylRtbYZs

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Aashish Jha is an Assistant Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi where he uses genomics to decipher human population histories and microbiomes. His recent work has focused on traditional Himalayan populations and his current research projects include genomics and microbiomics of Nepal, India, Africa, and Oceania.

Aashish received his BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology from University of California Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Human Genetics from The University of Chicago. During his postdoctoral scholarship at Stanford University, he started The Himalayan Diversity Project to study the genetics and microbiome of Himalayan populations. His work in the Himalaya is supported by grants from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Stanford University Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (CEHG). Aashish has published two dozen peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. A complete list of his scientific publications can be found at Google Scholar.

The Anthropocene, Indigeneity and the Planetary Imagination

Sunday, 30th Aug 2020

7:00 – 9:00 pm NST

Why should scholars engage with the anthropocene? Is the anthropocene an invitation to think and act more globally and collaboratively? Or is it license to accelerate the hyper-modern projects that already threaten to suffocate and unhome indigenous communities? Reflecting on the on-going ‘The Skin of Chitwan’ exhibition and their own research, Nepal scholars Pasang Yanjee Sherpa, Austin Lord and Alston D’Silva discuss how the category of indigeneity as an increasingly vital line of analysis of planetary crises complicates and informs questions of agency, climate change, and political imagination.

Please register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sfuqhqj8oH90M89DrTiryjHtt9u4YQoBe

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, Ph.D. is an anthropologist currently based in Seattle, U.S.A. Her research areas include the Sherpa diaspora, climate change and Indigeneity in Nepal and the Himalayas. She has taught at the New School in New York, Pacific Lutheran University, Penn State University, Washington State University and University of Washington. Her interviews have appeared in Alpinist, Al Jazeera, BBC, Foreign Policy, PRI’s The World, Newsweek, and BYU Radio’s Top of the Mind. For more: www.pasangysherpa.com

Austin Lord is an anthropologist whose research focuses on questions of disaster and aftermath, time and temporality, water and energy, and the ways people reckon with uncertainty and socio-ecological change. His PhD dissertation research focuses on the ways that the people of the Langtang Valley are rebuilding their lives in the wake of the 2015 earthquake and reorienting themselves in relation to unevenly imagined futures. His scholarship has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Economic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Political Geography, WIREs Water, Modern Asian Studies, Environment and Planning D, Himalaya, and Limn. Austin is also a photographer, filmmaker, and curator – in 2018 he co-curated an exhibition for Photo Kathmandu that drew from the ongoing work of a collaborative archival initiative called the Langtang Memory Project. He holds a Masters in Environmental Science from Yale University, and he is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University.

Alston Angelo D’Silva is a researcher, critic and educator. His ongoing research on the social dimensions of science and technology, human and machinic exploration of outer space, and new media activism have been presented in such diverse forums as the American Studies Association Conference, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, the Extending Play Conference at Rutgers University, the Humanities and Social Sciences Seminar Series at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Mohali, India. He has engaged in cutting edge interdisciplinary humanities research through his collaborations at UC Santa Barbara including with the Graduate Center for Literary Research, The New Sexualities Research Group and the Media Fields Editorial Collective, where he was the co-editor for the issue “Spaces of Protest”.