On Thursday 14th October 5.00pm, we will be holding our monthly casual French Lab meeting referred to as the 'After Lab' with Annu Jalais, a Singapore-based Environmental Anthropologist!

On this occasion, we are delighted and privileged to welcome Annu Jalais, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore’s South Asian Studies and Comparative Asian Studies Departments. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching experience focuses on the human-nonhuman interface, environment, and climate change, religious identity and migration, caste, and social justice. Her primary region of specialization is South Asia, specifically Bangladesh and India, and her secondary zone of interest encompasses Southeast Asia and China, especially around Indian Ocean exchanges in the religious and cultural realms. She is the author of two books, a few articles and is currently collaborating with artists, scholars and Sundarbans islanders on developing two projects: the ‘Southern Collective’ and the ‘Asian Bestiary’.

To find out what Annu Jalais will be covering during her AfterLab, please take a look at her abstract available here:

“Making ethnographic sense of beasts, people, wild environments”

How do ideas about beasts and the wild inform our socio-cultural worldviews? Following anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, who have studied the intimate relations humans share with animals, there is now a greater engagement with culturally diverse understandings of the non-human. This has offered a necessary and important challenge to discourses based in Judeo-Christian ideas of ‘nature’ where the animal is always seen as inferior to the human. What are the ways in which we can today rethink non-western, non-hegemonising, non-imperial relationships between humans and non-humans? An exploration of the “non-human” in various Asian cultures highlights why ethics and politics are so important on any study of the non-human.

Members and non-members feel free to join us !

For more information about what the French Lab is and what we do, check our website out: https://frenchlab.sg/