Post-Doctoral Researcher, Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences
Contributing Editor Alumni, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Africa | Agriculture | Ethnography of science and technology | Food | India | Regulation | Regulatory bureaucracies | Risk and Hazard | Science & Technology Studies |
About Abhigya
Abhigya is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Processes and Sustainability of the Global Change Research Institute (Czech Globe), Czech Academy of Sciences. She is interested in power dynamics that shape participatory processes in food systems research and the discursive authority of crop modelling frameworks. She received her PhD from the IIT Delhi, India. Her doctoral dissertation examined the politics of evidence surrounding the regulation and use of agricultural pesticides in India.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Abhigya's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Charting the (Dis)course of Nature Restoration: The EU Nature Restoration Law in the Public Sphere in Czechia
The EU Nature Restoration Legislation was finally adopted in 2024, after going through the rounds of the EU parliament since 2022. The passing of the law marks a key moment in the EU’s pursuit of the European Green Deal, adopted in 2019. The European Green Deal is the EU’s growth strategy aimed at putting EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. The ambitious Nature Restoration Legislation is expected to provide legal instruments to facilitate the restoration of declining ecosystems across the European Union. It supports some of the key goals of the biodiversity pillar of the Green Deal (the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030), akin to how the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) sets legally binding climate neutrality targets for the member states. Some of the measures outlined in the regulation include supporting sustainable agriculture, greening cities and towns, (read more...)
The Silence before the Silent Spring: Narratives of Modernity and the Silences around the Toxicity of Pesticide Use
Pesticide-use and the control of pest populations with synthetic chemicals are a subset of the history of the “modernization” of agricultural practices. This narrative positions pesticides as an antidote to the food supply problem of the growing world population, but it remains eerily silent on the assault on the entire ecosystem that the continuous use of chemicals entails. These moments of silence in history act as heuristic devices that crystallize aspects of historical production that best expose when and where power gets into the story (Trouillot and Carby, 2015, p.15). The dominant narratives and silences around the question of pesticide exposure point towards the locus of power in the story of the development of modern agriculture. (more…) (read more...)