Brinda Sarathy

Visiting Scholar

Brinda Sarathy is assistant professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. Her book, Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest (forthcoming in Fall 2011 from UBC Press), provides a social history of Latino immigrants and forestry in the Pacific Northwest, and a comparative analysis of pineros today with Anglo loggers and tree-planters from prior decades. Sarathy received her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management in 2006 from the University of California, Berkeley, and held a post-doctoral position at the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UCMEXUS). Her research on pineros has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rural Sociological Society, the Morris K. Udall Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?