The Global Countryside: Podcasting the Most Important Story of the 21st Century

• Friday, September 19
• 5:30 PM
• Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Mezzanine (Audubon Side)
• 121 Wall Street
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Join 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Rana Dasgupta and Maryam Aslany, Visiting Fellow in Agrarian Studies at Yale, for an urgent and wide-ranging conversation on “The Global Countryside.” Together, they explore why the agrarian crisis, and the future of farming communities may be the defining story of our century. Moderated by Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, the discussion draws from their forthcoming Audible podcast—launching September 18—which follows the lives of cotton farmers in India. They’ll share insights from a critical but overlooked section of the global population, discuss the challenges of writing about agrarian life, and consider how their travels in the “global countryside” have shaped their individual work—bringing back urgent stories from the front lines of climate change and political transformation.

Maryam Aslany is a writer and academic currently based at Yale University. She is the author of ‘Contested Capital’ (Cambridge University Press: 2020) which explores the rise of the rural middle classes. Maryam is currently writing twin volumes, ‘Peasants’ (Bloomsbury, Knopf: 2027), and ‘Goddess’ (Knopf: 2029), which together provide a portrait of planetary society, economy, and politics, focusing respectively on the two extremes of the global supply chain. Based on extensive travels, Peasants will give readers an intimate account of the crisis affecting the world’s largest – and most invisible – constituency. Journeying from the Indian countryside to the Peruvian mountains, from townships in Ivory Coast and Ghana to rice terraces in China and Cambodia, the book will offer personal testimonies reaching to the backbone of the global economy, transforming readers’ ideas about the system they live in. She is the co-writer, with Rana Dasgupta, of a major podcast, Harvest, produced by Hollywood’s Plan B and Amazon Audible, exploring the crisis of the global countryside. It captures the lived realities of rural life—tragedy and triumph, struggle and exploitation, despair and resistance. Maryam holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from King’s College London (2018) and an MSc in Indian Studies from the University of Oxford (2013). In addition to her current academic work in the US, she has held research positions in the UK, Norway, France, Australia, India, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of Anthropology, Professor School of the Environment, and Co-Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He also co-directs the Yale Inter Asia Initiative and jointly coordinates the combined PhD program in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. Having previously worked on forest management and wildlife conservation in India, his current research and writing includes work on environmental jurisprudence in India and urban ecology in Asia.

Sivaramakrishnan has published work in environmental history, agrarian studies, political anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural geography, and Asian Studies. Most recently he is the co-editor Sustaining Natures: An Environmental Anthropology Reader (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023). Sivaramakrishnan servesd fifteen years (till 2024) asone of the Editors of the Journal of Peasant Studies. He edits a book series titled Culture, Place and Nature for the University of Washington Press; he also co-edits another book series titled Global South Asia, also at the University of Washington Press.