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Paper short abstract

Energy and extractive industries are reshaping land, value, and livelihoods across much of the world. Based on fieldwork in the Thar Desert, this project examines how “green” infrastructure polarizes land use, dispossession, and resistance around sacred groves and agrarian lifeways.

Paper long abstract

Across much of the world, energy and extractive industries are reconfiguring how land is inhabited, valued, and governed. While framed as pathways toward sustainability, these transitions often intensify socio ecological inequalities, polarizing destinies between actors who benefit from new “green” economies and communities who experience dispossession and livelihood insecurity. My project examines these dynamics through an ethnographic study of large scale infrastructural expansion in the borderlands of the Thar Desert across India and Pakistan. Drawing on feminist, queer, and postcolonial political ecology, I analyze how land takeover reshapes agrarian livelihoods, social relations, and moral economies of land. I focus in particular on community conserved sacred groves (orans), which function as sites of subsistence, care, and more than human relation, yet are rendered expendable within state led and modernist visions of green development. While developmental projects generate new forms of land use polarization, producing conflicts between energy production, grazing, ritual practice, and survival, communities contest these transformations through everyday resistance, legal challenges, and prefigurative practices.