Expressing a sense of place

In Bhalla, Assam, in India’s northeast, farmers sometimes leave out bowls of rice for elephants passing by on their seasonal paths. Pujita Guha says the gesture expresses a relationship based on care. The villagers regard the elephants as guests passing through a landscape both species inhabit.

Guha is an artist, curator and researcher who studies how people understand, document and form relationships with their environments. Her work in environmental media and environmental humanities focuses primarily on Indigenous communities in northeastern India, Southeast Asia and parts of China.

Guha examines how those communities describe environmental change and challenge official narratives through storytelling, art and other media. While government media may portray local residents and elephants as threats to each other, residents’ stories, artwork and everyday practices offer an account of coexistence.

In her book “Forested Media,” she asks how Indigenous communities across Asia have used artistic, cultural and media practices to claim lands since the 1990s. Guha notes how activists create citizen networks, document environmental damage and intervene in decisions that affect their communities. “My research is about the world and how we are all entwined,” she says.

She grew up on the outskirts of Kolkata, where swamplands became “giant concrete jungles.” This transformation changed not only the physical landscape of Kolkata but also who lived there and who had access to resources. At the time, questions about pollution were entering the public conversation. From this foundation, her interest in the environment began.

At Mount Holyoke College, Guha will use digital storytelling through familiar media — social media and videos — to teach students. Guha wants them to examine how ideas about politics, citizenship and the environment become encoded within the media. In a course on food cultures, students will assemble a cookbook while critically investigating where their food and its ingredients come from.

“Critique doesn’t have to be very serious all the time,” Guha says. Students can approach an everyday object like a cookbook with analytical rigor, creativity and fun. Guha wants students to become “better thinkers and ethical thinkers” who recognize their responsibilities to their communities and environments. That responsibility extends across professions and disciplines because environmental questions are present in the air people breathe, the food they eat and the resources they use.

Guha was drawn to the scale and intimacy of a liberal arts college. “You want to be in humane institutions where you know other humans in the institution as well,” she says. Mount Holyoke’s faculty culture, close dialogue with students and history of supporting critical inquiry made it feel like such a place.

At a moment when, Guha says, artificial intelligence, reduced funding and public criticism are placing increasing pressure on the humanities, she sees liberal arts colleges as essential spaces for open-minded study. She hopes students will see the humanities not as something “to hold onto nostalgically” but as a way of thinking they can actively carry into everyday life.