Events

Mountain Tales: love and loss in the municipality of castaway belongings

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute and the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity

Online public event

Speakers

Saumya Roy

Dr George Kunnath

Priyanka Kotamraju

Chair

Dr Shalini Grover

Join us for this event in which author, journalist and activist Saumya Roy will discuss her new book, Mountain Tales, which explores the "noxious and wonderful world" of Maximum City's rising mountains of garbage and the waste pickers who trawl through them.

The towering garbage mountains are reflections of modern India and provide a window into local and global inequalities that arise from overconsumption, pollution, climate change and poverty. Saumya Roy will be in conversation with Dr George Kunnath and Priyanka Kotamraju about the truths that are unravelled through the stories of the small, forgotten community that lives and works amongst Mumbai's castaway belongings.

You can order the book, Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Speaker:

Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist based in Mumbai. She has written for Forbes India magazine, Mint newspaper, Outlook magazine, wsj.com, thewire.in and Bloomberg News among others. In 2010 she co- founded Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro entrepreneurs by giving small, low interest loans. Her first book, Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings, was published by Profile in 2021.

Discussants:

George Kunnath is a Social Anthropologist and a Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. His work focuses on the everyday world of Dalit and Adivasi communities living amidst India’s Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency; on caste and class relations; relationality of poverty, inequality, conflict and development; and research ethics.

Priyanka Kotamraju (@peekayty) is a PhD Candidate in sociology, and a Gates Scholar, at the University of Cambridge. She is an independent, bilingual journalist from India, with nearly a decade of experience in the media industry, and focused on issues of social justice, gender and inequality. Priyanka was part of the inaugural cohort of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme in 2017-18.

Chair:

Shalini Grover is a Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE focusing on anthropology and gender studies. For over two decades her principal areas of research have been marriage, kinship, love, divorce, legal pluralisms and globalised care in urban India and transnationally.

More about this event

The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many of the School's departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

The Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme is a Global South-focused, funded fellowship for mid-career activists, policy-makers, researchers and movement-builders from around the world. Based at the International Inequalities Institute, it is a 20-year programme that commenced in 2017 and was funded with a £64m gift from Atlantic Philanthropies, LSE’s largest ever philanthropic donation.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #LSEInequalities.

Accessibility

This event has live BSL interpreting and human-generated captions. LSE aims to ensure that people have equal access to these public events, but please contact the event’s organiser as far as possible in advance if you have any access requirements, so that arrangements, where possible, can be made. 

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