Independent (Aadita Chaudhury)

I am a researcher, writer and arts practitioner interested in roles that engage with my existing skills in interdisciplinary research at the nexus of the arts, science, ecology and spirituality, dedicated to collective liberation and embodied, regenerative futures. My research interests are primarily surrounding the anthropology, history and philosophy of biology and the ecological sciences. I am especially interested in perspectives from the global south and the role of science and technology in the establishment of empires, socioeconomic development, technoscientific imaginaries and political self-determination. I began thinking with the arts when other methods of academic inquiry failed to provide adequate answers. I have conducted research in the US, Canada, the UK, Italy, India and Mexico, attending to multiple intersections of ecology, culture, technology and the arts. I have found existing methods for social research in many ways to be lacking in attending to the polycrisis of the present moment. My involvement with artistic practitioners as part of both my academic and personal life, my own literary and visual arts practice, and my experiences as a 6-time transnational migrant have shown me that various place-based dimensions in complex socioecological contexts remain overlooked under dominant framings of sustainability. In 2023, as part of the inaugural cohort of EARTH Scholars, I began developing a methodology to situate arts practice as a meaningful catalyst for generating new knowledges about the climate crisis, at the Edinburgh College of Art. The arts often are used as a mere communication channel for scientific knowledge, and are not acknowledged for their unique epistemological traditions within certain institutional spaces. My research hopes to change that. My interest in the arts-science-ecology nexus is informed by my upbringing in Santiniketan, India, a rural university town founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore as a site for his own experiments with place-based pedagogies and arts practice. I am particularly compelled by the ways that arts practice continues to be deeply entangled with land-based lifeways in the region, leading to a potential contemporary ideal for ecologically conscious socially-embedded community arts practice and peasant futurisms. I am interested in improving my skills in creative/nature-based facilitation, embodied regenerative practices, and place-based post-growth economies beyond capitalism