Claudia Lang delivered a lecture on ‘Environ-mental Health: Suffering, care and repair in toxic urban environments in India’. It was chaired by Ananya Vajpeyi.
Over the last years, scholars have started to explore the mental health related effects of late industrialism environments. Some call attention to mental distress provoked by the slow violence of environmental degradation and climate change, pointing towards affective orientations to presents and haunting futures of planetary damage. Others investigate possible mental health and neurocognitive effects of pollution and toxins, showing how unevenly distributed toxic exposure might sediment in the mind. What emerges are new articulations of what I call ‘environ-mental’ health that link individual, social and environmental damage. While risking pathologizing suffering, these relational conceptions of unwell being also hold potential for positive change. As people are enduring environmental damage, which minor forms of care, repair and mobilization are emerging?
Claudia Lang is a medical anthropologist at the University of Leipzig and the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her current research focuses on how people rethink mental health in times of increasing digitalization and changing environments. Earlier she has worked on depression, Ayurveda and global health in India. She is author of Depresssion in Kerala and co-editor of Global health for all and The Movement for Global Mental Health.
Ananya Vajpeyi is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 10 February 2023, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom http://bit.ly/3wsNzSZ
