RCN Book Talk - In Praise of Floods by James C. Scott
In our second book club event, we are inviting Aarti Kawlra (Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program at IIAS, based in Chennai) to lead a discussion of James C. Scott’s recent book, "In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings” (Yale University Press, 2025). Please join us on Teams on Tuesday, 12 May at 15:00 CEST for this hybrid event. All are welcome for this event: you do not have to read the book to join the talk!
We are very pleased to announce our second online book club event to generate and discuss collective reflections related to our respective interests and experiences in rivers. Each book talk will be led by a discussant, who will select a book and pose one or several questions related to the work in advance, and lead the conversation. Are you interested to be a discussant for a future RCN book club event? Please let us know at rcn@iias.nl. Please join us here on Teams on Tuesday, 12 May at 15:00 CEST.
The author
James Scott was emeritus professor of political science and professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale University, and a prolific author in the fields of political science, history, anthropology, geography, and agrarian and environmental studies. A "dissenter and an outlier”, he was well-known for his "suspicion of any administrative power that reflected the power of the state” (Yale News, In Memoriam, July 2024), which is a theme in his books such as “Weapons of the Weak,” “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” and “Seeing like a State.” In "In Praise of Floods”, James Scott looks at rivers in all their socio-cultural, political and ecological dimensions, with a special focus on the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) river in Burma/Myanmar.
The discussant
Aarti Kawlra is the coordinator of the Humanities Across Borders (HAB) network and program of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, The Netherlands where she works with colleagues in the global South and North to develop civically grounded, collaborative teaching and research methodologies in higher education. She is interested in using methods of social anthropology, history, geography, cultural studies and feminist studies to interrogate colonial, postcolonial and global discourses of culture, education, heritage, development, and ecological transformation from a people's lived experience perspective. She is the co-editor of the Humanities Across Borders Methodologies Book Series of the Amsterdam University Press. Her publications include the Routledge book chapter "Narrating Indigo" in Chandan Bose and Mira Mohsini edited Ways of Studying Craft (2023) and the monograph We Who Wove with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India, Orient Blackswan, 2018.
Header image: photo by Aung Myin Thu on Unsplash