Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, where she leads the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability. Over the past 25 years, her work examines social-ecological change in forests and cities of South Asia from the perspective of both ecology and justice. Her awards include the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award. She has written a number of books including “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities” (Penguin, 2019, with Seema Mundoli). Prof. Nagendra writes a monthly column ‘The Green Goblin’ in the Deccan Herald newspaper, and is a well known public speaker and writer on issues of urban sustainability in India.
Amrita Sen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and a Visiting Faculty with Azim Premji University. Her research interests include cultural and political ecology, politics of forest conservation, urban environmental conflicts and Anthropocene studies. In 2019, Amrita received the ‘Excellence in PhD Thesis award’ from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, for her doctoral research on the conservation politics in Sundarbans. She is the author of A Political Ecology of Forest Conservation in India Communities, Wildlife and the State (Routledge 2022), which draws on her PhD fieldwork in the Indian Sundarbans.
