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SUMMARY:'Big Cats and the City: building evidence against out-of-place bea
 sts in India' - Nayanika Mathur\, British Academy postdoctoral fellow and 
 postdoctoral research fellow on the project 'Conspiracy and Democracy: His
 tory\, Political Theory and Internet Research'
DTSTART:20161123T130000Z
DTEND:20161123T140000Z
UID:TALK68186@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Graham Allen
DESCRIPTION:This paper studies the presence of leopards in high population
  urban centres in India. It undertakes a comparative analysis of the sight
 ing and habitation of leopards in three cities: Mumbai\, Shimla\, and Dehr
 adun. It demonstrates how potentially dangerous and seemingly out-of-place
  animals elicit different responses by virtue of the places they inhabit. 
 Through a focus on key individuals\, the popular media\, and animal rights
  activism\, this paper highlights the distinct narratives on living with l
 eopards that have to come to dominate in the three cities. In particular\,
  it dwells on the sorts of evidence against big cats that is marshalled in
  these stories to account for their dissonant presence in the urban. Many 
 incidences of conflict between leopards and humans have taken place in Deh
 radun and Mumbai whereas\, thus far\, there have been no such reported inc
 idents in Shimla. In Mumbai there has been an active engagement between th
 e forest department and various individuals who came together to devise me
 ans of peaceful co-existence. In Shimla\, there has been either a studious
  ignoring of the leopards or feeble efforts to trap and relocate leopards.
  In Dehradun\, the only response to the presence of leopards has been to i
 mmediately hunt them down. What accounts for these distinct approaches to 
 the very same phenomenon: the living-with big cats in urban India? What in
 sights into the specificities of space and place may we unearth from this 
 comparative ethnography? What are the processes through which hegemonic na
 rrations emerge and how is evidence built up against the (ultimately-unkno
 wable) nonhuman?
LOCATION:Combination Room\, Wolfson College
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