Interview with Sushmita Chatterjee

Samuel Beckenhauer:: Thank you again for taking the time to be with us and have a conversation today.

Leah Ramnath:: Could you please introduce yourself?

Sushmita Chatterjee:: I am Sushmita Chatterjee, a professor and chair of the department of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. And I recently moved there last July from Appalachian State University where I was the director of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. So, it’s been a year of transitions and learning new things. And all of it has been pretty wonderful.

SB:: Could you give us a little bit of a preview of your plenary talk this evening on “Becoming Animal, Becoming Transnational”?

SC:: You’re all very intrigued and interested! Can I ask you before I tell you what I’m going to talk about, what’s your first impression when you heard the title or where do you think it would lead?

SB:: Well, I was reading your recently published edited volume Meat!: A Transnational Analysis and, so, I was thinking of the introduction as well as your chapter Beefing Yoga: Meat, Corporeality, and Politics. I thought it would likely be connected to that.

LR:: I was thinking along the lines of hybridization. There’s this atomic, molecular, rhizomatic rhetoric happening in theory these days. Thinking through the terms in the title, I thought maybe you are going to talk about the interconnectedness between species or going toward post-species theorization or something like that.

SC:: Oh, my goodness. You all are really good. You all make it actually sound more interesting! So, I’m going to be taking inspiration from both of you. My talk continues some of the work that I’ve been doing on meat, but also thinking about how we figure out objects, whether it’s meat, and also the animals. So, what my talk will do is to think about questions of animals and animality and animalization through transnational circuits, and that’s something that Meat! also did. So yes, it’s a continuation of that interest in the sense that I ask: how do these words, concepts, and categories travel through transnational spaces? My talk is actually going to be divided into two parts: the first I’ll be talking about a chapter in my forthcoming book. I look at the figure of the animal, both as man and as a political animal in the national frame of things and also what would it mean for the animal to become transnational. Here I’ll be working with Suniti Namjoshi’s work to think about queering the question of the animal. The second part of the talk is going to be about a new book that I’ve just started working on that is thinking about the plant turn, and its similarity with animal studies, and also how questions of feminization and “new woman” creep into all of these conversations. So, overall, what I’m trying to do is to think about species distinctions and categories, and think about overlaps, and also the way in which power structures create these categories for a certain objective. Further, I pay attention to how we keep reiterating them in all our new theoretical turns and returns.

SB:: That’s fantastic. I think that’s a really rich problematic to think through. I have a follow up question regarding Meat! the edited collection of essays. I’m curious about your interest in food because I was tracing where your dissertation on fictive images—how did you come to your interest in food politics? I don’t know if you’ve sort of picked up on it while here so far, but there’s a bit of an undercurrent of interest in food politics through Virginia Tech. There’s a number of panels on food in this year’s ASPECT conference. So, what was your entryway into food politics?

SC:: Great question. And here I’ll be sounding a bit nostalgic! I came into food studies actually from animal studies. As a grad student, and because I’m in your company, I got more nostalgic about my grad school days. We had a great graduate and animal studies reading group, and we had people like John Landes and Susan Squier in our program. It was just a wonderful community of scholars and as grad students, we participated in it. I used to be in the company of these folks, and we had conferences discussing these topics and that’s how I got introduced to animal studies. That conversation and intellectual community continued and I started, when I got my first tenure track job at Appalachian State University, I was teaching a very popular class called “Woman, Food, and Nature”. That was my first introduction actually to Food Studies as a formal area of inquiry. Before that, of course, I love eating and I love cooking, but you know, that’s no rationale for why a person should be teaching a Food Studies class! Also, students in the class had questions about what is meat, as well as how, for instance, when we read texts in Food Studies how we think about veganism or who is a carnivore. My students kept asking me: “how do these theories travel around the world?” That’s what inspired Meat! Meat! was an inspiration directly from these conversations where I contacted Banu Subramaniam, my co-editor for the volume, saying that there needs to be an intervention into these conversations about how meat travels through transnational routes through place and time. She is amazing, and a great colleague to work with. And, so, that’s how we got together this amazing group of scholars to put together Meat! The University of Michigan Ann Arbor gave us great funding to bring people together and publish the book. But, returning to the question, I would say, I arrived at Food Studies because of the apparent need, that is in terms of teaching needs, and student questions. This prompted and inspired my research trajectory.

LR:: It seems like you use similar methods, like visual studies, from your dissertation to your current research projects. Although your central object of inquiry has changed, from evaluating political cartoons to meat, would you say your methods have not?

SC:: You know, I do visual analysis selectively, simply because I get quite daunted by permission, like in the sense of our politics nowadays, of obtaining permissions; it just takes a lot of time. So, whether I use this method or not depends on the very pragmatic logistical question of if I have the time! Besides that, in terms of how I have done my method of visual analysis is what I do with images is to question frames and framing. This is similar to the work I do with Meat! with the questioning of the frame of the animal. There’s a sort of fluid trajectory, quite a seamless trajectory, both in terms of questioning and understanding frames of analysis and visual politics and questioning frames of meat, questioning frames of food. I do not see them as separate or drastically different, but rather interested in the same politics.

SB:: I think one of the parts that really stood out in your chapter Beefing Yoga: Meat, Corporeality, and Politics was your explanation of what is technically classified as beef or what is not. You note that there are different cuts of meat that may or may not be classified as beef. Moreover, this system defines, potentially, what meat can and cannot be exported and sold. I thought that was a really fantastic way of approaching the politics of not only meat, but more generally the classificatory systems that are taken for granted.

SC:: I’ll be talking about that this evening! You’re absolutely right, that when we export, in this case, meat, the USDA characterizes and has criteria determining what is beef. There’s such a mischievous sort of maneuvering around it and that’s also part of the politics of meat. But the politics of meat is also a question of who becomes meat or what becomes meat. So, for instance, let us think about men eating meat and women as meat, right. That’s the way in which we think about the gender politics of meat. Meat! was also an urge to complicate these relations. For instance, there’s an essay in the book by Angie Wiley about queering veganism. Then there’s an essay by Parama Roy about acts of sacrifice and becoming meat. Also, fake meat; what would be the gender politics of fake meat? If seen as a mimesis of the original; is that a sort of a drag meat culture? It’s all of those questions that inspired this thinking, but your questions are right on. It was so much fun writing the book. And that’s what makes gender studies and all these sorts of spaces so special because we think together with our colleagues and build up from each other, becoming much richer in the process. It’s just wonderful.

SB:: I want to go back to the question about the difficulty of using images and permission rights. I was thinking of your piece with Mithu Sen. That was a very collaborative piece between the two of you and the result of a long-term engagement preceding the article. My question is how do you decide what to work on next? What are some of the challenges and opportunities that go along with these processes?

SC:: For me, there’s never a dearth of interesting questions or things that I want to work on. So, it’s always a question of whether I have the time and how do I schedule these things along with my administrative and teaching responsibilities? In terms of the next project, I think about whether it’s a question I’m interested in answering and if there is a need to answer it. I’ve never planned my academic life or my career! Following my time in graduate school, I moved one step at a time, and I think my research has also flowed in a similar manner of just following the steps. The next book project was written because when I completed the first draft of the manuscript, tentatively called Postcolonial Hauntings: Play and Transnational Feminisms, I knew that I needed to address the question of “who is this animal that we constantly talk about?” Reflecting on the abundance of literature centered on Plant Studies in the field, I also wanted to think about how do these questions, concepts, frames become important? And so again, it gets back to the question of framing. This is also what you asked me about in terms of visual politics. The next book project is about thinking about the frame. Frames of plants and animals in the context of climate change.

SB:: I have two very different questions stemming from that response. The first is a more practical question. How do you deal with the difficulty of finding time to write? What is your work process and writing process? And the other question, to go back to your dissertation concerned with fictive images in cartoons, it seems like one of the things that’s changed since the mid to late 2000s is the technological system by which we receive images. The proliferation of images has become even more saturated since then. So, how do you sort of reflect on the question of maybe what has changed since you wrote your dissertation in terms of the technological system that delivers us images?

SC:: That’s a great question. First, I want to reiterate, it depends on how I see the frame of things. Then, I’ll get to technology because I think that’s also a certain framing device. So, for instance, when I’m thinking with frames and thinking about what’s included and excluded in the frame, what’s inside and what’s outside, it’s often what we have a certain social intelligibility to decipher, or a certain social intelligibility to read. And, there are certain bodies, you might call it bodies, energies, however you want to call it, that are always transgressing or sort of moving in, outside and inside the frame. Mithu Sen’s work comes in here, too. Sen is a phenomenal artist and helps me think through some of some of the questions that I’m interested in. And so, the question of technology: what is technology? We often think about technology as different from techne and episteme. Think about the distinction Aristotle makes. Donna Haraway reminds us that technology an infolding in world making, so, an infolding of the body. Those are quite distinct ways of thinking about technology. The reason I mentioned this is because both tell us about a certain frame that’s used to understand technology, but if we think about it as an infolding of the flesh or, moving with Donna Haraway, what we understand is somatic politics, or ways in which we make and unmake bodies. For me, the question of new technology and the images it’s about new bodies that we create under current power configurations and bodies that we are not willing yet to see under current power configurations. Technology is never outside of the social semantics of bodies and world-making. I do not read technology as an outside or an apparatus, or as simply as strategy. For me, it is much more than that. It is sort of, you know, the nature-culture part of world-making.

LR:: How are you thinking about this work of world-making in the current political climate? Currently in Florida, and across the United States, there is an aggressive move to remove anything remotely within Critical Race Theory.

SC:: You know, I think there are oftentimes that are quite ironic when we think about crisis. That is, we always think about it in the present tense that it is happening now. What I want us to think, though, is, if we think about the crisis or the temporality of crisis as something that is always a question when it comes to maintaining a certain power configuration. How then would our response change? When I think of education, it has been both a colonial and an anticolonial project, in the sense that it is one of the ways in which colonialism was established. It is also one of the ways in which colonialism was refuted. So, when I think about the present and the challenges we face, what is incredibly important is to think about all of this as dispersed and that it has a differential impact on different people. Once we are able to see its impact, we can get a more nuanced understanding of what the crisis of the present moment is. Covid-19 taught us that not everybody is impacted the same way. There are huge social stratifications. Also, in terms of policing and surveillance during this time the question was what’s the target and hasn’t that always been the target of the State? What do we do in academia to be vigilant about those scenarios? That is how I think about it. But I know, when we’re thinking about activism, we need a particular situation to respond to. When I teach also, I keep telling my students it is always a cycle of the old as new and the new as old coming back and forth and what we do not see as structures that keep these moments in place.

SB:: It is sort of like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, right? We’re always already in the ruins, seeing the catastrophe. I want to follow up on that question. What do you see as some of the most significant crises facing the academy? I think it’s shocking what is happening in Florida. But, at the same time, there’s been a number of positive efforts, for example, the unionization efforts in Rutgers this past week. There seems to be a lot up in the air right now. What do you see as the priorities for scholars? Additionally, what is the precise crisis and what are the priorities for thinking politically and critically at this moment?

SC:: Let’s think about this question through the climate crisis. It is something that is impending; it is increasingly getting more intense. It is not simply an environment outside, bound to the physical earth. But it is also the climate in academia, inside departments, inside homes, right? If we think about all those different scales of time and place, in a sort of fragmented method or methodology, it deepens and complicates the climate crisis. Further, none of these can be seen as outside the question of race or gender, or sexuality or nationality. Then we have the question of democracy, participation, and also what do we do about the differential power stratifications? One of the urgencies is to see issues in a conjoined manner. That is, to see how these issues are actually similar and entangled. That’s why I love your conference theme, “Cultivating Entangled Imaginaries”, because that is actually the challenge. About understanding how they work together and keeping them separate is actually a political project.

SB:: With this in mind, let’s go back to your dissertation for a moment. You introduced the concept of a democratic imaginary. It sounds to me that the need, in some ways, is to sort of cultivate, still, the democratic imaginary that allows for an ability to confront the overlapping ongoing crises. Does that sound right?

SC:: Excellent. You know, you are making my words sound more interesting than it is! When we think about democracy, we know that it is a speculation. That’s the politics of hope. Right? So, a working democracy or even democracy to see it as it is; it is utopia, in the sense that it has never really existed. That is the critical value of democracy. There is always something that we strive for; the impossibility of democracy, that is one way of thinking about it. I think about the potential for a democratic imagination that is, you know, how far can we make our minds travel? It is the politics of hope that can give us the strongest way to think and work through the climate crisis. If we think about it as an impending doom, sometimes it is a question of the end of politics as a result. I think it gets back to a very traditional Marxist question of dialectics, of moving forward, and of thinking through other futures. I would look at the democratic imagination as exactly that kind of a potential or a possibility to come.

LR:: How do you respond to critiques of radical hope or critiques of radical hope? It is utopian; therefore, it is in need of critiquing because utopia is this faraway thing. I get a sense that you are employing similar frameworks as José Muñoz and Maria Lugones. So, how do you respond to those types of critiques that are very critical of world traveling?

SC:: You know, sometimes when we have critiques of hope, or world traveling, it is oftentimes the question of, you know, is there a certain ableism and is there a certain privilege in those contexts. What about hopelessness? So, there are all those ways of approaching the question of radical hope. But, for me, when I am thinking about radical hope, I am also thinking about it as a question of the imagination. I am traveling with the imagination to understand another’s perspective. Let me rephrase. It is such a position of privilege to actually think that poor people, queer people, or disabled people do not have hope. Let’s put it another way, to think that poor people actually really identify as being poor. Is there a sense we are almost positioning an ontology, a certain ossified ontology onto others, when we critique a politics of radical hope? Are we projecting certain stereotypes or our expectation of certain populations not wanting certain things. And I am not saying that it ever should be or can be sort of a monolithic project where everybody would be in the same space with regards to what is the goal at hand, but it is definitely a question, again, of the imagination. And I think that it is also a fact of knowing that it is always fragmented. There will be many imaginations, but where can we travel and what can we do with them?

LR:: I am thinking about the work of Sylvia Wynter, Audrey Lorde, and Katherine McKittrick, and their shared imperative of remaining human and humanizing others in their research. Regarding your work, how would you respond to Black feminists who argue to be seen and see others first as human?

SC:: Tell me a little bit more.

LR:: In Black feminisms, particularly argued by and for Black women, to be extraordinary or more than human is to continue to, in some degree, dehumanize them. In other words, within the Black feminist critical tradition, staying human is a central part of the work. Thinking about the title of your talk tonight, “Becoming Transnational, Becoming Animal” though not necessarily at odds with this central goal of Black feminisms, is somewhat in tension. I know that your work is not formally located within this disciplinary tradition, but carrying forward with this question, how would you respond to a critique arguing that becoming transnational and animal is another discourse of dehumanization? As you are talking about the framings and the differences of being in a multilateral distance, what are your thoughts on that?

SC:: Absolutely, it is a great question. My work is definitely influenced by a lot of Black feminist thought, whether it is Audre Lorde or Silvia Wynter. I cannot get enough when I read those texts. It is a question of reading them over and over again. I’m thinking of Wynter’s work, when we talk about sort of the overall presentation of man, for instance, or even Audrey Lorde’s Zami. It is a book that has so many references to flowers, plants, and animals. The question of subjectivity is seen in such fluid terms, that oftentimes when we think of our own ideological politics, we place it in certain genres or theoretical spaces, while it can move everywhere. And to return to Silvia Wynter’s work. Here you are asking a really good question. That is, you’re asking a question also that feminists were asking in terms of critiques of post-foundational thought. What about identity, what about people for whom identity is the goal? That is also a critique that feminists have had with Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, and their becoming animal is almost like a masculine politics of overturning binaries. When you already have it [identity], what about those who do not? That is a question definitely that I am agonized about. The privilege of these becomings, and that is something that I work on in my own work. For instance, if you’re looked upon as the zoo, everywhere you go, right, then what’s the politics of becoming animal? So, I’m definitely, totally influenced by both the critiques and also by Deleuze and Guattari. I see them as sort of playful politics of overturning borders, but I do note that questions of class, gender, and nationality, actually can be exponentially more playful. I do not think that they’re playful enough. That’s something that I’ll be actually talking about in my talk this evening. So, it is not that I do not question it. I completely am with it that these are power tropes, and they are doing it, Deleuze and Guattari. They are critiquing a state dictated philosophical apparatus, right? They give us a theory of becomings as a sort of a counter-theory or a counter-politics to that. They give us a play of becomings; becoming-woman, becoming-animal. In terms of Black and Brown communities, we actually see sometimes a greater variety of becomings than we even can dream of theorizing. So, that is how I would answer that critique. How do we maintain and keep that tension alive? It is sort of a critique of the privilege of becomings while knowing that there’s bountiful becomings in many different worlds.

LR:: In your writings, you have situated yourself in this tension and paradox of ‘how do I maintain this theoretical standing while doing justice to the thing without flattening it and homogenizing?’ It is good to see it happening in real-time, too.

SC:: Thank you. I do enjoy my work and I am a theorist. Theories give us almost like a playfield that gives us the opportunity to think with so many prisms, lenses, and all of that.

SB:: To switch topics a little bit. I’m thinking of some of the workshops we have at the ASPECT conference this year. And I think there are two questions there that might be interesting to pose. One is how do you think about your research in relationship to your pedagogy? How do you approach your pedagogy through the lens or frame of your work through playfulness? Maybe that is the first big question.

SC:: Great question. You are absolutely right. Play is something that weaves its way both through my pedagogy and my research. That is my book project, but it’s also the way that I’ve been teaching for years. For me, when I think about play, I’m thinking about a deconstructive dialectics, that is, in the sense of moving back and forth. It is a sort of agonizing, the kind of agony that goes into thinking, thinking with issues. Now in terms of play though, there’s another issue. Play can be situated in both politics of the left and the right. What I mean by that is we are also being played at and played with. So, play is not simply just a politics of resistance or resilience. Capitalism is very good at playing with people. There are ways of thinking about how all of these politics can have double nuances and I think that thinking with play means recognizing that it can go either way. Once we are attentive to that, I think that is what makes it sort of a feminist and queer sort of stance when we know that it’s not always good or not always something that can be used by us. It can also use us. So, that’s, that’s how I think about it.

SB:: I hear in that response the importance maybe not only of play, but of both ambivalence and the reversal. I think that, to bring it back to pedagogy, I think that’s a really important aspect to get students to think about in a classroom, right? How do you sort of embody ambivalence or convey ambivalence, and this politics of the reversal and of play?

SC:: I should point out that I love teaching. The classroom is one of my favorite spaces, and I get most of the inspiration in my life from the classroom. My students, we think together so I do not position myself in the classroom as the knower or the doer of everything. It’s that back and forth. It’s about sitting with a text for us; reading it together. I sometimes end up reading aloud in the classroom and ask my students to do that too, if that is something that they are comfortable with. It is those really spontaneous moments of mutual combustion. Of mutual worlds opening up, and so they’re pretty magical moments. Some of my fondest memories and also experiences of academia have been in the classroom and it has been a really important ingredient of it all.

LR:: I really enjoyed your article “‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?” There you talk about humor a little bit. How do you incorporate humor pedagogically? How does humor add, let’s say, a world-making transformative process?

SC:: I got into political science actually wanting to study here myself. When I was in India during my master’s, I wrote a master’s thesis on laughter. That creeped in there and then I came to the United States to do my graduate work and had to do another MA here. But the question of thinking with laughter and humor has also been quite a persistent thread throughout my academic career. I see humor as the space of displacement because think about also humor and irony, what makes humor humorous sometimes it is the politics of hope that the world is not as it should be, right? Humor is displaced from how it is or even satire and things like that. To me, that is also a certain way of thinking about hope about possibilities. But it is also a question of an undoing that, you know, that we open ourselves up to different forms of relationalities. Humor has always had a really special place for me when I’m thinking about politics. Oftentimes when we think about institutional politics, we think about it as rather humor-less, that it is all serious. What we forget is sometimes how the jokes or moments of laughter is when some of the real political work gets done. It is not simply a critique of bad humor, right, or jokes that are sexist and racist, which are, of course, really problematic and we need to be critiquing and working against it, but certain informal mechanisms that happened through humor are also spaces of real power negotiations and of almost changing the spirit of the room.

SB:: Is it fair to say that humor is almost a way to sort of shift frames for you or to see what maybe is latent, or maybe what is not otherwise visible?

SC:: That’s excellent. You said it better than I have.

SB:: No, I am just repeating back what I heard in your response, but I think it’s a really good way of putting it. What else can maybe happen in a certain space? Perhaps undermining expectations is not the right term, but how can humor or timing make something else appear?

SC:: You are absolutely right. Or, even think about the bodily motion of laughter. It is about the frame moving. It is about the borders, of not being able to control the way in which the borders might shift. You have said it the best, it is about thinking about the movement of frames. That it shifts those frames.

LR:: Can you say just a little bit more about the “spirit of the room”?

SC:: Oh, absolutely. People getting a joke or laughing at a matter also, we know is not unanimous, it is very seldom that everybody in the room gets a joke or finds something funny. But think about the commonality or the solidarity that forms when two people do get the joke, right? Or even when somebody does not get the joke in the sense it might mean. Humor and laughter are very much also about situating and understanding power. And so that is another way the spirit in the room might change. It may not be as radical a move as changing people in office and things like that. But it can certainly change a certain dynamic or a power equation in the room at least for a little bit. So that’s what I meant by the spirit of the room and how humor can be used not to flatten out, but often to maybe to make more clear the power configuration in the room.

SB:: That’s really excellent.

SC:: I’m also very interested in spirits. My book is called Postcolonial Hunting. That’s the one that I’m working on. I believe in ghosts, and I do believe in spirits, and I think part of this also comes through thinking about the question of afterlives, like in Saidiya Hartman’s work, or even Derrida’s Specters of Marx. A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Marxism, that’s, again, the democratic imagination and the politics of hope.

LR:: What else do you want to haunt with this? What ghosts are you trying to generate? What do you want to haunt people with when they read your work?

SC:: I want people to be self-reflective about positions, theories, and concepts. That maybe is the ghost that I want to haunt, that is, what are the categories that we are sacrosanct about? Even this question of the man, woman, queer, straight, animal, plant, right? It’s the ghost of categories that I essentially want to haunt [laughter]. Many of these categories are colonial categories. We take it and we use it in our political struggles, and we give it more energy, we give it more fire, through our politics. How do we understand that the colonial project continues despite our feminist and queer leanings? We use those categories; we keep using them.

SB:: It seems that throughout your work that Derrida is a pretty major touchstone. This is a huge question, but what does deconstruction sort of mean here? I hear a deconstructive impulse animating our conversation here. Not only showing the frame, shifting frames, maybe undoing frames, right? I hear a sort of Derridean impulse throughout here. Can you maybe speak a little bit more on this?

SC:: Definitely. I’m very much influenced by Derrida and also by Spivak. In terms of when I think about deconstruction and thinking about undoings. I also take seriously Spivak’s emphasis that there is a ‘con’ in deconstruction. That is where my question of frames, humor, and unsettling comes in. Understanding the ‘con’ or understanding the framing. It is very, very useful for my work and the way both in which I think and teach Derrida’s work. The first text that I read from Derrida, this was in grad school, we were reading The Animal That Therefore I Am. This was our animal studies reading group and that had a really lasting impact on me. I thought, ok, we have this philosopher who keeps saying Who am I? What would it mean to question who I am under the gaze of a cat? Teaching it and thinking with it through the years, there is the question of privilege that feminists have been talking about for ages, but this gets credibility only when you have a male philosopher writing about it. So, there has been all of those conversations about this piece, but that is a piece that keeps haunting me and primarily because of its potential for self-deconstruction, that is in the sense that an undoing of the self and positioning questions of agency, and all of that at the at the center of our thinking. So that’s a key text but it’s also Specters of Marx, again, it’s just brilliant. That’s another very, very favorite text. And that’s also a book that I continue to think with in terms of understanding ontologies. When we talk about ontologies, what would it mean to talk about hauntologies, instead? That gets back again to the question of framing and thinking only with a specific body politics in mind.

LR:: Three final questions! What is next for you? Where do you plan on going? What other projects are you working on?

SC:: I just joined Colorado State University as Chair of the department, so I’m teaching less at the moment. And I’m missing teaching. So that is something, but there is such possibility in these positions also in terms of thinking about curriculum and opportunities for our students. So, I’ve seen this as a sort of a new chapter in my life about different jobs or different things that I had not thought about before because I had been teaching for years. This has been a slight change in ways I have thought about myself or conceptualized myself. What I hope is that I continue doing things that I enjoy, and that has been the case so far. I’ve been incredibly lucky on that front, because, you know, I’ve taught women’s and gender studies classes, classes on global feminism, women from nature, classes on queer theories and queer ecologies. I hope that the next step still carries with it the same amount of love for what, or, I wouldn’t call it love, let’s call it the inspirations and the enjoyment. Thank you for that question.

SB:: I think that is a great note to end on. Thank you again, Dr. Chatterjee for taking the time and speaking with us this afternoon.

SC:: Thank you very much.