During years of travel and research, Dr. Luisa Cortesi of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, discovered that local communities see and interact with their rivers radically different from the ways that builders of infrastructure and energy do.

In this Saturday University lecture focused on the North Bihar region of India, Dr. Cortesi will speak about her research in combining anthropology and environmental sciences in the built environments in and around the Ganges River. Dr. Cortesi lived in the region for over five years, and over that time observed tensions over development, local cultural practices, and some of the most disastrous floods the region had ever experienced. Join Dr. Cortesi on her explorations of the world’s rivers in an important discussion of culture, politics, economics, and people in our increasingly wet world.

Luisa Cortesi (Ph.D. at Yale University) is an anthropologist, environmental scientist, and development practitioner. She has earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University, and postdoctoral research in STS at Cornell University, and now an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands, and a Sustainability Fellow at Freiburg University in Germany. She has worked with NGOs and the United Nations in India and sub-Saharian Africa for several years, and founded the Water Justice and Adaptation Lab, a platform for collaborative work between scientists and communities on water-related environmental justice.