In this bonus episode, author and environmental engineer Sangamitra Iyer shares an adaptation of her paper presented at the More Than Human Rights Conference, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the artistic and ethical choices that shaped her debut book, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed (Milkweed Editions). Drawing on her work as a literary animal, Sangamitra explores how we write about animals beyond metaphor and symbol, tracing lineages of nonviolence from ancient Tamil poets to working elephants in colonial Burma to the hidden language of industrial depopulation — weaving together family history, water rights, and planetary grief into a single, interconnected story.
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