Dr Megnaa Mehtta

Academic position: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Department: Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction

Email: m.mehtta@ucl.ac.uk

Biography:

Megnaa Mehtta is a social and environmental anthropologist with an interest in values, mythologies, and ideas of well-being as these themes intersect with debates in global conservation, political ecology and the environmental humanities. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Conserving Life: Political Imaginaries from a Submerging Forest based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans located in the Bengal Delta, a global conservation hotspot and a region emblematic also of the ongoing climate emergency.

Alongside her academic writing, Megnaa mediates between a range of environmental stakeholders, including lawyers, activists, filmmakers, government officials and conservationists, with the aim of locating specific fault lines and debates within conservation practices, as well as convivial forms of learning across regions, disciplines, and forms of intervention.

She received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2020, before which she studied at Yale University, Delhi University, and the University of Cape Town.

Research Projects:

2023-2025 Centring the Household in a Climate Emergency aims to research gendered mobility with climate-induced displacement, coastal erosion, and migration as the backdrop to shifts within families and households in the Bengal Delta. Funded by AXA Fund
2023-2024 Conservation Basics: Alongside anthropologist Dan Brockington and evolutionary ecologist Kartik Shanker, I am co-authoring an open access textbook on conservation social science targeted towards first year undergraduates.
2023-20205 (Re)Constituting a South Asian Environmental Humanities supported by ICAS:MP is a interested in (re)exploring the dialogues, debates, timelines and concepts necessary for charting what might constitute a distinct South Asian trajectory of and for the environmental humanities.

Publications:

Intimate Antagonisms and Unlikely Friendships between State and Society in the Sundarbans Forests of India. Forthcoming in 2024 in Current Anthropology.
Nonhuman Governance: Care and Violence in South Asian Animism in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME). Volume 42.3 December 2022 issue. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10148247
Crab Antics: The moral and political economy of greed accusations in the submerging Sundarbans Delta of West Bengal, India. In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). Volume 27 Issue 3 June 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13551
‘The Production of Vulnerability: Generating Aquaculture Profits by Preying on Poverty in the Sundarbans.’ In Scroll.in (2022)
‘The Quintessential Prey: Care, Coexistence and Predation in a recent Hindi film on human-animal relations’ in Himal South Asian. (2021)
‘A Licence to Kill in the Sundarbans’ In the journal-magazine The India Forum (2021)
‘A New Crisis and an Old Conversation: Reflections on Quotidian Care in the Sundarbans.’ In American Ethnologist Pandemic Diaries on “Intersecting Crises” (2021)
‘A Sinking Island of Political Pawns’ with Kalpita Bhar Paul, a newspaper article for The Telegraph (2021)
‘More than Rising Water: Living Tenously in the Sundarbans’ in The Diplomat, with historian Debjani Bhattacharyya (2020)
‘Is Managed Retreat Plan for the Sundarbans Misguided’ in The Diplomat, with historian Debjani Bhattacharyya in (2020)
‘Is concrete the way forward in rebuilding the Sundarbans?’ in The Telegraph, with historian Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya in (2020)
“What the Sundarbans tells us” a podcast interview for Himal South Asia (2020).

Teaching:

IRDR0036 Anthropological Theory for Global Humanitarianism

How might anthropological theory and the conceptual tool kit that anthropology has to offer help us better understand, interrogate, and transform the debates, practices, and moral foundations of global humanitarianism?The aim of this module is to make sense of our deeply troubled global moment with its ongoing environmental and political crises by situating these crises within histories of colonialism as well as long-standing moral and ethical debates within anthropology and its neighbouring disciplines. We will explore fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to be human? What are the moral and ethical foundations of humanitarian actions? Do some lives have more value than others? How might the ecological crisis be understood as a crisis of imagination? And how might we understand disasters, risks and vulnerability through an anthropological lens. We explore themes that have been long-standing topics of study within anthropological theory such as: mythology; the study of bureaucracy; everyday ethics and concepts of care as they are linked to debates and issues within humanitarianism ranging from the politics of aid, ideas of neutrality, the making of ‘slow disasters,’ to critically understanding the Anthropocene. The course explores the role of the nonhuman within humanitarianism while simultaneously situating the ‘natural’ within the folds of the all too human.

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