Aadita Chaudhury is a Research Assistant to the ERC-funded Sonic Street Technologies project at Goldsmiths, University of London. While finishing her doctoral studies in science and technology studies at York University in Canada, Aadita has been attending to the ways arts-based methodologies and the realm of the senses can be instrumentalized as provocations and epistemologies in social science research. Her doctoral dissertation project explores the multifaceted cultural, material and environmental meaning-making, building on her ethnographic and media research on fire ecology and wildfire management in California and internationally. Her research further investigates the practices surrounding both ecosystem and built environment fires around the world to situate how themes of coloniality, valuation and race emerge in the context of fire management. In 2020, she was a virtual resident in the UNIDEE residency program in Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, exploring visual modes of representation, embodied modes of relating and poetic form in relation to fire/combustion as a phenomenon along with arts practitioners from other disciplines from around the world. As an elected student representative for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Aadita has helped organize the annual internationational meetings for the Society in Melbourne and New Orleans and helped facilitate the online meeting in 2020. She is a former contributing editor to Platypus, the official blog for the American Association of Anthropology’s Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing. Her academic and non-academic writings cover a wide range of topics, including environmental and medical humanities, anthropology of science, arts-based research, futurist narratives, decolonization, Indigeneity and anti-fascism.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Articles and book charapters

—— and Sheila Colla. “Next Steps in Dismantling Discrimination: Lessons from Ecology and Conservation Science.” Conservation Letters, November 17, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12774.

——, with Audra Mitchell. “Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘End’ of ‘the World’: White Apocalyptic Visions and BIPOC Futurisms.” International Relations, August 18, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820948936.

——. “Strategic Essentialism and the Celebrity in Absentia of the Indigenous of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian social imaginary” in Indigenous Celebrity by Robert Innes and Jennifer Adese (editors), University of Manitoba Press, April 2021.