Department of Geography

Paleo Body Politics: Re-wilding Health, Ecology, and Diet During the Anthropocene

In an era of environmental anxiety, "re-wilding" has emerged as an ecological health and resiliency strategy across scales, from the human body to the planet. At the scale of the body, this has meant a reevaluation of dietary, consumption, and lifestyle behaviors among concerned consumers seeking to create healthy, resilient bodily ecosystems. Recent health trends such as the controversial Paleo movement call upon an evolutionary perspective for insight as to how to re-wild one's bodily ecosystem in the face of ecological crisis, using the Paleolithic era as a benchmark for dietary and behavioral re-wilding. Drawing upon data from interviews with Paleo and Keto dieters, I investigate how the discourse and practices surrounding the Paleo and Keto diets engage with the shifting landscape of healthcare and nutrition politics, new ecological conceptions of human health and bodies, and a growing understanding of the connection between human and non-human/environmental health in the Anthropocene. I argue that the body's ecology is a new frontier for an ecological ethic of health and sustainability and a microcosm for interrogating the politics that go along with it. Further, I argue that there is an underutilized potential of the body as a (bio)pedagogical site for understanding the dynamics between the body, food, health and ecology.

Dr. Indran Naidoo is the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since January 2012. He heads the largest evaluation office in the United Nations system globally, and serves as a Vice Chair of the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG), a professional network for evaluators.

Indran has over two decades experience in leadership positions focused on advancing the use of evidence in decision-making, nationally and internationally. As head of the IEO, Indran has led a pivotal and comprehensive reform to UNDP’s evaluation function, reforming its governance to secure full independence, including direct reporting to Executive Board; also building the most robust and dynamic evaluation office within the United Nations development system. Indran's perspective is grounded in his experience as a senior public servant in South Africa Government, where he successfully elevated the profile and importance of evaluation as a key accountability and learning tool in government. For two decades he has been a high profile leader in the international evaluation community – as author, editor, commentator, key note speaker and chair of multiple national and international journals, forums, conferences and events, including the series of global conferences on National Evaluation Capacities of which he has been host and convenor. Indran has been a board member of the South African M&E Association and of the International Development Evaluation Association and is Vice-Chair the United Nations Evaluation Group.

Postcolonial Atmospheres: How Delhi's Air Pollution Crisis is Shaped by Colonialism.

Asher Ghertner
Department of Geography
Rutgers University

This presentation examines how popular and governmental responses to extreme air pollution levels in Delhi-which the WHO declared the most air-polluted city in the world in 2014-draw from spatial logics, aesthetic orientations, and scientific protocols with roots in colonial rule. Using three case atmospheres-the Indian lung, the hill station, and the air-purified home-it argues that a geographical imaginary institutionalized in colonial urban planning has led spatial practices of sequestration to supersede post-colonial investment in pollution abatement. By focusing on the infrastructures through which urban air pollution is rendered a tropical norm, it argues that until the colonial ontology of sequestration is broken down, investment in prosthetic technologies of seclusion will detract from structural efforts to produce air otherwise. It concludes with reflections on how we might conceptualize a postcolonial Anthropocene.

Details to follow

Spatial Risk Estimation for Individualized Auto Premiums based on Geographic Information System

Dipak K. Dey
Department of Statistics
University of Connecticut

This presentation is based on analyzing big auto insurance claim data to improve spatial risk estimation and classification. We explore a spatial variant of the double generalized linear model (DGLM), in which Tweedie distribution, as a special case, is used to model the pure premium, and the spatial correlation is incorporated via graph Laplacian regularization. The estimated spatial effects are then used to generate risk rankings at the county/zip code level. Simulation results and real data analysis showcase the efficacy of the new methods. Besides our recent progress, the challenges we face in large-scale predictive modeling and our future directions will also be discussed. In particular, we focus on collision data and build models for each state in US separately.