S7E7: Urban Health Histories with Heeral Chhabra

In this episode we delve into how urban health histories can help us to understand changing multispecies health. Heeral Chhabra tells us how the welfare of free-roaming dogs in India was caught up with the colonial history of the country and how rabies saw drastic changes in human-dog relations. 

Date Recorded: 27 September 2024. 

 Heeral Chhabra is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Remaking One Health: Decolonial Approaches to Street Dogs and Rabies Prevention in India Project at University of Liverpool. She was awarded PhD from the University of Delhi (2022) for her thesis Animal ‘Welfare’, State Regulations and Questions of Cruelty c.1900-1940s which sought to understand animal-human relationships in colonial India through the prism of law.  Her career trajectory so far has led her to research positions and teaching endeavours globally. She is also a Visiting Fellow at IASH, Edinburgh University and has previously been a Global History Fellow at International Institute of Social History. She has published widely on matters related to animals in Indian history. She is currently working on her manuscript The Barking Subjects of Empire: The History of Street Dog-Human relations in Colonial India, and also co-editing two books - Animals and South Asian History: Species, People and Environment; and Writing Global History from Global South. 

Featured: 

• Animals and Colonial Indian Archives by Heeral Chhabra
• Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below by Jason Hribal
• Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives edited by Michael J. Glover, Les Mitchell
• The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India by Krithika Srinivasan
• An analytical framework to understand the problematization of urban (historical) animals by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• The Kingdom of Dogs by Matthew Adams

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb

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